Agatha Christie

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

 Agatha
Christie
1890-1976
!
• The world’s best selling
author
• 66 detective novels,
including And Then There
Were None and Murder on
the Orient Express
• 14 short story collections
• The world’s longest running
play, The Mousetrap
 Christie’s Life
• Born into a wealthy family
in southwest England
• Home-schooled until 12
• Went to Miss Guyer's Girls
School, which she hated
• At 15 went to finishing
schools in Paris
• Never attended college
• Disappeared for 11 days
in 1926 when her husband
left her for another woman
The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd
• Published 1926; generally
considered her masterpiece

• Voted the greatest crime

novel ever by the Crime
Writers’ Association

• Caroline Sheppard is a
precursor to Miss Marple
• “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the supreme, the
ultimate detective novel. It rests upon the most
elegant of all twists.… This twist is not merely a
function of plot: it puts the whole concept of
detective fiction on an armature and sculpts it into
a dazzling new shape…. And only she could have
pulled it off so completely. Only she had the
requisite control, the willingness to absent herself
from the authorial scene and let her plot shine
clear.”—Laura Thompson, Christie’s biographer
 Critical Reactions

• Edmund Wilson: “Who cares who killed Roger

Ackroyd?”

• Pierre Bayard argues for a different solution—

Caroline as the murderer! Compare the account on
35-50 with the final two chapters. Why believe the
second rather than the first, if there are conflicts?
Hercule Poirot
Philosophical
Themes
 Enlightenment Themes

• Truth

• Knowledge

• Reason

• Progress
 Truth

• “The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious

and beautiful to the seeker after it.”

• “Tell me the truth—the whole truth.” There was

silence. “Will no one speak?”

• “The truth is what we need now.”

 Realism

• There is an absolute, mind-independent truth about

who committed the murder

• “Guilt is in the eye of the beholder”—NOT!

 Perspectives
• Dr. Sheppard: “Every new development that arises
is like the shake you give to a kaleidoscope—the
thing changes entirely in aspect.”

• Dr. Sheppard: “Of facts, I keep nothing to myself.

But to everyone his own interpretation of them.”

• All detective fiction depends on the possibility of

differing interpretations
 Knowledge

• “I tell you, I mean to know. And I shall know—in

spite of you all.”

• “Mon ami, I do not think, I know.”

• “Me, I know everything.”

• “You call it guessing. I call it knowing, my friend.”

Science, Logic, Reason

• “I admit nothing that is not—proved!”

• “Use your little grey cells,” he said. “There is always

a reason behind my actions.”
 Intuition

• “But it is all wrong that Caroline should arrive at the

truth simply by a kind of inspired guesswork.”

• “I believe, James, that in your heart of hearts, you

think very much as I do.”

• “You don’t believe in impressions?”

 Intuition

• “Women observe subconsciously a thousand little

details, without knowing that they are doing so.
Their subconscious mind adds these little things
together—and they call the result intuition.”
 Intuition

• “You can’t know,” I snapped. “I didn’t know myself

until I got there, and haven’t mentioned it to a soul
yet. If that girl Annie knows, she must be a
clairvoyant.”
 Testimony

• “It wasn’t Annie who told me. It was the milkman.

He had it from the Ferrarses’ cook.”

• “always bearing in mind that the person who

speaks may be lying.”

• “You know that it is so—but how am I to know?”

 Norms of Assertion

• “Caroline has constantly asserted, without the least

foundation for the assertion, that his wife poisoned
him.”
 Dishonesty, Secrecy

• “Everyone has something to hide.”

• “Each one of you has something to hide.”

• “I discover all the little secrets. It is my business.”

 Detective Fiction
• The author has to hide certain things in plain sight

• S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright: “15. The truth of

the problem must at all times be apparent—provided the
reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the
reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should
reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a
sense, been staring him in the face—that all the clues
really pointed to the culprit—and that, if he had been as
clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery
himself without going on to the final chapter. That the
clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes
without saying.”
 Two-level theories

• Surface level: words, actions

• Hidden level: motives revealed by what the

characters are hiding

• Dr. Sheppard: hides his role in his journal

• Poirot himself is hiding quite a lot!

 Cost of the Truth

• “…do you never reflect that you might do a lot of

harm with this habit of yours of repeating
everything indiscriminately?”

• “People ought to know things. I consider it my duty

to tell them.”
 Weakness

• “You are weak, James.”

• “strain of weakness”—p. 201

Weakness and Moral Luck

• Poirot, “totally unlike his usual manner”:

• “Let us take a man—a very ordinary man. A man

with no idea of murder in his heart. There is in him
somewhere a strain of weakness—deep down. It
has so far never been called into play. Perhaps it
never will be—and if so he will go to his grave
honored and respected by everyone.”
Weakness and Moral Luck

• “But let us suppose that something occurs. He is in

difficulties—or perhaps not that even. He may
stumble by accident on a secret—a secret
involving life or death to someone. And his first
impulse will be to speak out—to do his duty as an
honest citizen. And then the strain of weakness
tells.”
 Social Context
• Education

• Wealth

• Social class

• Gender

• Pastoral setting

• Poirot as foreigner
Disillusionment
 Unreliable Narrator
• The first postmodern novel?

• Decentering

• Descartes: “I think, I am”

• Hume, Buddhism: no self

• You don’t have direct knowledge of anything, even of

yourself

• “But for some reason, obscure to myself, I continued to

urge him.”
 Albert Einstein

• Einstein (1879-1955)

• 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics

• Time, 1999: “Person of the

Century”
 Theory of Relativity
• Second Scientific Revolution

• 1919 Eddington expedition

• November 7, 1919, London Times: “Revolution in

Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian
Ideas Overthrown”

• Paul Dirac: “probably the greatest scientific

discovery ever made.”
 Relativity of Trajectory
• “I stand at the window of a railway carriage which
is travelling uniformly, and drop a stone on the
embankment, without throwing it. Then,
disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I
see the stone descend in a straight line. A
pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the
footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a
parabolic curve. I now ask: Do the “positions”
traversed by the stone lie “in reality” on a straight
line or on a parabola?”
 Relativity of Trajectory

• “The stone traverses a straight line relative to a

system of co-ordinates rigidly attached to the
carriage, but relative to a system of co-ordinates
rigidly attached to the ground (embankment) it
describes a parabola… there is no such thing as
an independently existing trajectory, but only a
trajectory relative to a particular body of reference.”
 Relativity of Velocity

• I throw a baseball at 60mph, on a train moving in

the same direction at 60mph.

• An observer on the train measures my pitch at

60mph

• A stationary observer outside the train measures it

at 120mph
 Relativity of Velocity

• I throw a baseball in the opposite direction

• An observer on the train measures my pitch at

60mph

• A stationary observer outside the train measures it

at 0mph!
 Invariance of the Speed of
Light

• Suppose you shine a flashlight on the train

• The speed of light will be the same, whether

observed in the train or outside it

• How is that possible?

 The Relativity of Time

• Are two flashes of lightning simultaneous?

• Suppose they are, to a stationary observer.

• Then they won’t be to someone on the train.

L1 O1 L2
 Relative
• Relative to an inertial frame:

• Trajectory

• Velocity

• Simultaneity

• Distance

• Time

• Most of what philosophers have called primary qualities—

qualities thought to be in the things themselves
 Qualities

• Puzzle: How much of what we perceive is in the

world, and how much is contributed by our own
perceptual and cognitive faculties?

• Primary qualities—in the thing itself

• Secondary qualities—contributed by our faculties

 Qualities

• Primary: extension, motion (velocity, acceleration),

mass

• Secondary: color, texture, odor, sound, taste….

 Einstein’s Laws

• The laws of physics are identical in all inertial

frames.

• Light signals in vacuum are propagated

rectilinearly, with the same speed c = 3 X 108m/s,
at all times, in all directions, in all inertial frames.
 What isn’t relative?

• The speed of light: C is a constant, and has the

same value in all inertial frames

• The laws of physics are invariant: they themselves

hold in all inertial frames. “General laws of nature
are co-variant with respect to Lorentz
transformations.”
Galilean Transformation

• Suppose that inertial frame S’ moves in the

direction of the positive x-axis of S with constant
velocity v. Suppose that the event P has
coordinates (t; x; y; z) in S and coordinates (t’; x’; y’;
z’) in S’.

• Then the standard Galilean transformation of the

coordinates would be t’ = t; x’ = x – vt; y’ = y; z’ = z.
 Lorenz Transformation
• The Lorentz transformation is the following:

• t’ = (t – vx/c2) /√(1 – v2/c2)

• x’ =(x – vt)/√(1 – v2/c2)

• y’ =y

• z’ =z
 Relativity vs. Relativism

• Relativity does not imply relativism

• In fact, it contradicts it

• It implies that some truths (the laws of physics) are

absolute
Quantum Mechanics
 Quantum Mechanics
• States of a system represented by state vectors in
a Hilbert space—complex wave functions—
probabilistic

• Photons—properties of particles and of waves

• Conjugate variables—e.g., position and momentum

—Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

• Observation—collapse of the wave packet

Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat
 Logical Empiricism

• All our concepts come from

experience

• All our knowledge comes from

experience

• Everything complex is
constructed logically from
simples relating immediately
to experience
 Verification

• Criterion of demarcation

• Criterion of meaningfulness

• A sentence has empirical

content if and only if it is
verifiable
 Verification
• Criterion of demarcation

• Criterion of meaningfulness

• A sentence has empirical

content if and only if it is
verifiable

• Problems:

• Addition: A => (A v B)

• Universals
 Falsification

• A sentence has empirical

content if and only if it is
falsifiable

• Popper argued that Marxism

and Freudianism failed this
 Falsification
• A sentence has empirical
content if and only if it is
falsifiable

• Popper argued that Marxism

and Freudianism failed this

• Problems:

• Conjunctions: A & B

• Existentials
 Confirmation

• A sentence has empirical

content if and only if it is
confirmable or disconfirmable

• And all its components also

have empirical content?
 Ravens Paradox
• All ravens are black

• All nonblack things are

nonravens

• These are logically equivalent

• To confirm the first, we look at

ravens

• To confirm the second, we

look at things that aren’t black