Major Themes
Like Appointment with Death (1938) before it, this is a novel in which the victim is depicted as a sadistic tyrant whose characteristics are mirrored or distorted in the next generation. This theme arises in Christie’s work at the end of the 1930s, enabling her characters to explore the psychology of inheritance in later works such as Crooked House (1949) and Ordeal by Innocence (1958).
In some editions, the novel is headed by an epigraph from Macbeth that appears repeatedly in the novel itself: "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"
Read more about this topic: Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or themes:
“In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces.”
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“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
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