Jett Li 3/28/14 4th Hour

Appalling Death
In the massively suspenseful and baffling murder mystery And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie, the Queen of Mystery, tells the story of ten stranded strangers each with a shadowed past and a murderer in their midst as they die one by one. You may think you can get away with something or avoid something dreaded, but this storys mo st important and prominent theme shows otherwise in Dr. Armstrongs actions and in many other ways. Agathas story highlights the fact that guilt and fear will always catch up with you. One way that Christie illustrates the idea that your fears and guilt drive you mad is through what the characters think and say. For example, Vera Claythorne thinks, No, no, she mustnt think of Hugo. It hurt too much! The fact that she looks at her past so negatively and painfully exhibit her mad guilt of the person she loved and how she slowly dies mentally on the inside even though she seems fine on the inside, like a friend who is secretly fighting a battle on the inside. Also, Justice Wargrave says, I think, my dear young lady (Claythorne), we would all prefer to come and watch make it (tea). This acknowledges the extent of fear that each character has because everyone is so carefully watching and following each other. For example, if the teacher says someone in the class won 100 dollars, everyone would be suspiciously eyeing each other. Through the actions of the characters, Christie addresses that your personality changes

through fear and the past. First, the author describes how Armstrong acts, He twitched and his hands shook. He lighted cigarette after cigarette and stubbed them out almost immediately. Because Armstrong cannot control the shaking of his hands and his cigarettes, it implies that he cannot control his own fear. Nobody would be behaving this way if they were in a normal condition. Next, prior to Claythornes hanging, she believes that the last line of the poem is about getting married and that Hugo is upstairs waiting to marry her. Her insane thoughts suggest that she had become so heavily stressed by fear and guilt of her past that she began to believe the last line would come true and Hugo was actually there. Finally, the author asserts the idea that your character is manipulated through your fear and guilt by using her own imagery and quotes. For example, Christie describes the five remaining survivors as frightened people who did not bother to hide their nervousness. This clearly describes that each character had been so overflown by fear that they could not hide it anymore. For example, if you had not slept for days, could you hide your fatigue? Finally, Christie compares the characters. All of them, suddenly, looked less like human beings. They were reverted to more bestial types. Because Christie relates the characters to beasts, it emphasizes that since the characters have been changed by their fear of death to such an extent, the author can actually compare them to beasts without being ludicrous. We have all done something in our lives that we regretted or kept in the back of our heads. If you pretend you have never done something that you have done, the consequences will weigh heavier as time passes. Do you want a life filled with shrouded secrets and regret?