Introduction
Agatha Christie is a British writer of short stories, play, and novels. She is considered as the best selling novelist by the Guinness book of records. Her novels have essentially sold approximately 4 billion copies. “And then there were none” is a book that she wrote which is also her best selling novel where 100 million copies have been sold up to date. Therefore, she is an author who has been successful since her works talks about things that happen in life and perhaps this is what has made her works to be considered the best.
In this book, Agatha has brought out various themes, social class being one of them. There is essentially a set of concepts in the political theory and social sciences that are actually centered on social stratification models where people are essentially grouped into hierarchical social categories. The book takes place in Britain in 1930s periods. The common social classes in this book are lower, middle, and upper classes. The society in which the book takes place is stratified into social classes we can describe as strict. These distinctions play an imperative role in the novel. As the state of affairs on the island becomes more desperate, the social hierarchies keep on dictating behavior. Their persistence in fact makes it harder for various characters to survive. Rogers goes on performing his butler’s duties and yet in the loose there is a murder that has even killed his wife. Rodgers comes from a lower class.
Since it is expected of an individual of Rogers’s social class, he washes up after the people, remains to clean up in the downstairs after others have gone to rest, and early in the morning the following day rises to chop the firewood. This separation from the people of higher class, whom he works for, makes it easier for the killer to eradicate him. In addition, Dr. Armstrong’s class bound mentality proves to be disastrous for him and the others, as he fails to agree that someone respectable person like wargrave could be a killer.
Unlike the American democracy, British society is not in really built upon an assumption of no chronological identity. This is to say that class distinctions regularly find this as a foreign concept, but Agatha’s novels British audiences would in fact be very aware of class distinctions between the characters. In this book, the murders present on the Indian Island do not only represent a risk to the Island social order. Characters of all the classes engage in violence. The defiant and wit of the higher classes, represented by characters like Dr. Armstrong and Miss Brent, fail to be more effective at stopping violence than brute force of character from the working or lower classes like Mr. Lombard or Mr. Blore.
Agatha has therefore described about the concept of social class is a normal thing in our lives where you can not fail to see different social classes. This has been the one reason why her works have been considered best throughout the world since in this book and others, she has clearly described this concept. It is expected that people from the lower classes engage in violence but this is different in this book since the writer brings characters from all the classes engaging in these activities.
