Nothing But The Whole Truth Sparknotes

In the final chapters, interestingly entitled, “The Whole Truth” and “Nothing But the Truth,” Poirot, after unsuccessfully exhorting the criminal to confess, calls Sheppard to the side and reveals to him that he is aware that it is he who killed Roger Ackroyd, describing to him in characteristic detail exactly how he pulled the whole thing off. In a rather gruesome turn of events Poirot suggests that instead of taking the matter to the police, Sheppard take his own life, saying, “The truth goes to Inspector Raglan in the morning. But for the sake of your good sister, I am willing to give you the chance of another way out. There might be, for instance, an overdose of a sleeping draught. You comprehend me?” Here we are presented with a rather

Sheppard pauses to take pride in the way he manipulates the narrative, pointing out that he never technically lied, and in fact remained faithful to the events. The entire first-person narrative then, in retrospect, turns out to have been an elaborate exercise in equivocation, a carefully hidden confession of guilt. Towards the end of the novel, when Poirot comments on missing Hastings’ habit of documenting his cases, Sheppard submits the first twenty chapters of his document to Poirot for his perusal. Poirot’s reaction to the doctor’s manuscript is that it was “reticent” and that “it was strictly truthful as far as it went—but it did not go very far.” This is exactly true of Christie’s text—especially in the first half, where it is a defiant, hidden in plain sight confession. The manner in which Christie handles this complicated narrative is by allowing Sheppard the character to lie to other characters, but by making Sheppard the first-person narrator be always technically truthful in what he admits, and granting him the discretion of editing his story where and how he sees fit. That is, while Sheppard repeatedly lies to everyone around him, he never once lies to the