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The complete avoidance in mentioning about the Dictaphone in this novel, which later proves to be an important piece of evidence, is an efficient illustration of the use of absence by Christie. In most detective novels certain marked gaps are sustained until the end of the work only to be filled in during the final pages.
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The use of ellipsis and absences of certain details play a pivotal role in misdirecting the reader as well as preventing the reader from suspecting the narrator’s reliability. But after his confession the reader is bound to look back on his narration of the entire story trying to point out some loopholes in the narrative. In the aforesaid novel by Agatha Christie too the unreliability of the narrator cannot be established until the end when he confesses about being the murderer of Roger Ackroyd and about his causative involvement in the death of Mrs. As quoted in the essay “Narration: Levels and Voices” in the book Narrative Fiction by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “…when the outcome of the action proves the narrator wrong, a doubt is retrospectively cast over his reliability in reporting earlier event,” gives a substantial reason for the reader to question the reliability of the narrator, it however requiring the reading of the entire novel. We Will Write a Custom Essay SpecificallyĪgatha Christie, known as the Queen of Crime, having penned crime novels that are most widely published and read, has used this technique in an ingenious and successful way in her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). The use of this narrative technique is especially very effective in detective fiction where after being misdirected throughout the text the reader is left baffled by the striking revelations at a late crisis point.
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The unreliability of a narrator can source from his limited knowledge, his personal involvement and his problematic value-scheme. An unreliable narrator is one whose rendering of the story and/or commentary on it the reader has reasons to suspect. The use of the unreliable is a very important and unconventional narrative technique used by authors in creating an air of suspense and uncertainty around the story. The function of resorting to these varied narrative techniques is to emphasize or de-emphasize certain story-events, to interpret some and to leave others to inference, to show or to tell, to comment or to remain silent, to focus on this or that aspect of an event or character. He may distort these incidents, may not observe chronological sequence, he can use messengers or flashbacks, and so on and so forth. However, the author, while writing a story, can treat some incidents in detail and barely mention or even omit others. Of 5 The drawing of narrative inferences by the reader is very important to interpret the work well.