Hercule Poirot and Post Colonialism

Author : ANINDITA SARKER

Abstract : The implications of Agatha Christie's work are multifarious, yet her writings have been comparatively understudied in relation to her contemporaries. Her detective fiction has been much discussed for its general features and its representations of women and social hierarchies. However, her texts have hardly been analysed within the framework of narratology. Her mystery book Appointment with Death (1938) and A Caribbean Mystery (1964) is set in former British colonies and Christie provides an Orientalist perspective through Western narrators and key characters. These novels are told by Westerners about oriental landscapes and people, and they are watched by Westerners. Since the image of the objects of focalisation is built by the focalizers and conveyed to the readers in a literary text, the story is filled with their subjective viewpoints. Close reading of a book can give insight into the focalizer and its relation to the focalised. These novels expose the hegemony of the West over the East and the prejudiced perceptions of the westerners. The theoretical underpinning of this study is Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism .This writings conducts a comparative narratological examination of the focalised objects in these novels to illuminate how Christie's works reveal the prejudiced perspectives of Westerners towards the Oriental focalised

Keywords : Agatha Christie, Orientalism, Narratology, Oriental Focalized, Post Colonial.

Conference Name : International Conference on Modern Literature and Cultural Contexts (ICML2C - 26)

Conference Place : Kolkata, India

Conference Date : 1st Aug 2026