Digital Object Identifier
`This paper looks at how Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd reconfigures the conventions of the clue puzzle by foregrounding the reader’s role in producing misinterpretation. The clue puzzle is like a game between the detective and the reader. However, such egalitarian participation is inherently shaped by narrative tactics that give rise to misreading. In Ackroyd, Dr Sheppard is an unreliable narrator, but the reader’s total reliance on Dr Sheppard leads them to construct a succinct but eventually false interpretation of events. By showing how the clue puzzle elicits a hermeneutic error, the paper argues that Christie changes detective fiction from a genre of neat resolution into a site of interpretive uncertainty, leading to deception and misreading.
The research has been carried out within a theoretical framework that is both qualitative and grounded in reader-response criticism and narratology. In discussing the theoretical basis behind the analysis, through an exploration of reader response theories, primarily those formulated by Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, and including elements of narratology proposed by Wayne C. Booth, the systematic regulation of expectations, hermeneutical processes, and reader trust in the narrator come into view. It is discovered that the misreading of Ackroyd is not only purposeful but structural as well. Through the application of Iser's gaps, Fish's interpretive community, and Booth's unreliable narrator, it becomes evident that the reader is complicit in his or her own misdirection.
Dr Manisha Mathur. “Reading Wrong: Misinterpretation and Narrative Deception in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 375-390. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.24.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com