Major Themes
Agatha Christie’s story Death on the Nile has a very intrinsic plot with complicated lines and psychological undercurrents. One should read the entire book to understand the main ideas and circumstances under which the murder has happened. Therefore, the writer’s crime novels are always considered to be great events.
Unexpected twists, surprising facts, and shocking action are intertwined into the plot where Hercule Poirot is the only one who is able to solve the mystery and find out the answers. However, despite abrupt events happened in Death on the Nile, the solution has not revealed with shock of surprise as it is often presented in other Agatha Christie’s works.
Careful reading and comprehension of each chapter and desire to pursue implications, hints dropped by the detective are the only conditions for understanding the basic idea of the crime novel. In whole, the main characters, the setting, the murder, the climax and the denouement are closely interconnected and wrapped up with distracting event to always keep the reader in suspense.
Setting
It is not in vain that the writer locates the actions and scenes in Egypt, near the Nile River. It provokes a number of Biblical and philosophical themes. In particular, these contexts are used to express the optimistic themes, those of new life and the end of suspicion death and shadows (Bargainner 197).
The setting is an important contributor to the meaning of the story as well as solving its major mystery. In whole is divided into two parts where the first one takes place in London and the second one in Egypt, particularly on the steamer and at the Cataract Hotel serving the starting point for further descriptions (Zemboy 125).
Summary
Referring the specifically to the setting of the story, the plot lines start with the Poirot ‘s dining out in London when he notices a young couple Jacqueline de Bellefort and Simon Doyle (Christie 12). They meet Linnet Ridgeway, a beautiful and stylish woman that can offer a prestigious job to Simon. The story continues in three months with Simon breaking up with Jacqueline and marrying Linnet. Later on, a wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway is found dead in her room with a bullet in her head.
She is a wife of Simon Doyle who is desperately pursued by her former fiancée even on the board of the cruise liner. Therefore, Jacqueline is under suspicion because she is in love with Simon and she dreams of killing Linnet. She follows them on the board and joins other passengers among which one is a serious criminal who killed several people.
In the course of investigation carried out by Hercule Poitrot, many interesting details have been discovered that help the detective make several important conclusions. The solution is brilliant and the detective find out that the murder was a carefully organized plan initiated by the couple Jackie and Simon.
Characters
The major characters of the story involve Jacqueline de Bellefort and Simon Doyle – former couple, Andrew Pennington, Linnet’s American trustee, her maid Louise Bourget, Marie Van Schuyler, American socialite, and her cousin Cornelia Robson, and outspoken socialist named Ferguson, and Australian physician Dr. Bessner. Poirot also meets colonel Race who helps him investigate the crime. All the presented characters derive from the elite class and, therefore, Christie’s murderer is always confident and ambitious.
Works Cited
Bargainner, Earl F. The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie. US: Popular Press, 1980, Print.
Christie, Agatha. Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery. US: Harper Collins, 2011. Print.
Zemboy, James. The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Guide. US: McFarland, 2008. Print.