Agatha ChristieThe 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 L2O1

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