Use of Cognitive Fatigue as a Narrative Device in Golden Age Detective Fiction: Exploring Agatha Christie’s Selected Works

Abstract

Mental fatigue or ‘cognitive dulling’ is a psychobiological state which occurs when men feel exhausted in completing their work. They abort taking more effort when they cannot prolong working on the same task anymore. This state is induced by extensive work pressure or prolonged functioning of brain cells in resolving a case or a matter.

Similar analogy is estimated in detective literature where the writer has intent to prolong in disclosing the name of the murderer involved in the criminal act in order to distract and deflect the readers at arriving at conclusion. The writer seeks that readers should take efforts to find out the name of the culprit while reading a detective story but when they are not able to find it, they should give up on resolving the clues at last. At this stage, the writer allows his devised detective character to reveal the name of the main criminal involved in crime. It is the writer’s intention to induce ‘cognitive fatigue’ in readers who should keep conjecturing the murderer’s name until getting fatigued. It is also noticed that the interest of the readers does not cease; they feel amused when the detective character blows the gaff, and reveals the name of the actual murderer. This brilliant trait was most established in the golden age of detective fiction that employed an intensive mysterious background in its narrative to baffle the readers. Its ‘story world’ imbibes the intriguing and complex socio- cultural context in the story to distract readers so that they do not arrive at uncloaking the mystery.

In this reference, this work attempts to estimate the foregrounding of the background settings in the narratives of the golden age detective fiction (specially of the selected works of Agatha Christie) that incorporate multitudinous complex settings with the purpose to entangle readers until they get mentally exhausted in identifying the name of the main culprit in the syuzhet (story that unfolds gradually).