读书报告 Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express

The novel, by the famous mystery novelist Agatha Christie, is a murder about human nature. Belgian detectives Hercule Poirot returned to Europe and boarded the Orient express with the help of his friend M. Bouc. But when the train was stuck between Winooski and brooder in a snowstorm, news came that American businessman Samuel Ratchett had been stabbed and killed. After a series of investigations, the detective finally found out the shocking truth, the passengers on the train together killed the businessman. In fact, the real identity of the businessman is the notorious kidnapper. In the meantime, it puts the detective in a dilemma between the conscience and the truth.

Clever idea and ubiquitous foreshadowing in this book are fascinating. It's a battle between author and reader's intelligence. This story reminds me of an old saying that you can connect to any one person on earth without more than six people. That is to say, with six people at most, I can definitely connect with anyone, which is a little bit exaggerated, but also interesting. The novel where surprised me most is that the killer is not one or two people, but to all staff premeditated murder with strict collaboration. The key to solving a case lies in careful observation, making assumptions based on contradictions and finding differences from conventions. The most important thing is to get out of the limitation of thinking. The foreshadowing in this book is everywhere and only a few can be found at the second time. For example, in the car he was in, except for the Poirot himself, there were only two British passengers, one of whom was a British officer stationed in India, and the other was a demure lady. The two passengers seemed to know each other very well from their ways of talking. That night, when the train stopped at Konya, Turkey, Poirot got off to take a walk on the platform. He overheard colonel absinthe arguing with Miss Debenhams. And that's when these two men were arguing about the impending murder.

The novel is narrated in the third person. It seems that the narrator uses the omnipotent perspective to narrate the story in an invisible way. However, in the initial stage of narration, the narrator jumps out of the text, indicating that he is a summary narration after the whole event. The reason why Christie did not directly adopt first-person narration is that she left room for the use of alternative perspectives. The narrator in the meditation section shows the reader the stream of consciousness thought processes of detective Poirot, Mr. Booker, and Dr. Constantine. Only when the narrator uses the omniscient perspective, the limited perspective between characters can be transformed at will. The genius of Christy's narrative is that she has transformed the view of the world without any trace of her, making the characters to be the narrator, providing a limited and reliable narrative which makes the whole story extremely smoothly and reliable.