Previous
Situational Irony
Key Examples in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Chapter 2: Who’s Who in King’s Abbot
Explanation and Analysis:
The style of the novel is conversational but also clever and self-aware. For example, in Chapter 2, Dr. Sheppard recounts a conversation in which Miss Russell asked him about cocaine and untraceable poisons:
“Ah!” I said. “You’ve been reading detective stories.”
She admitted that she had.
“The essence of a detective story,” I said, “is to have a rare poison—if possible something from South America, that nobody has ever heard of—something that one obscure tribe of savages use to poison their arrows with. Death is instantaneous, and Western science is powerless to detect it. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
Related Themes:
