Narrator and Implied Author in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None: A Reader-oriented Approach

The problem of distinguishing between narrator and implied author has always been challenging in the field of narratology. Implied author is generally defined as the ideology which rules the intellectual realm of the society in which the author lives and the narrator or in one sense the voice which narrates the story. The narrator could exchange position from a third personomniscient or limited omniscient point of view to a first person one narrating through the eyes of one of the characters in the story. In this paper, we try to examine the ruling ideology through the act of narration of the story and thus assess the degree of being the same of the narrator and the implied author as representing the ideology ruling the narration. An attempt here is to show that the narrator has been, to a high degree, inflicted with ideology of British complacency and pride, biblical penetration and racism. A biographical and intertextual study of Agatha Christie also shows that she is known for her somehow belittling attitude toward the colonized people or as called today, the third world. In her Death on the Nile; for example, Poirot s arrogance while dealing with Egyptians is palpable.