Welcome to By the Books, a newsletter dedicated to capturing and distributing wisdom from works of classic literature.
Each post will take less than 5 minutes to read, and will feature one great book, including:
A brief summary
A distillation of relevant themes
One actionable insight
Live by the best books, one day at a time.
“And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie
In this genre-defining classic, ten strangers are invited to an isolated island by a mysterious host named U.N. Owen (ha ha). Once there, they discover a poem outlining the fate of each guest, and then, one by one, each of them are killed in ways that mimic the verses. Trapped on the island, trying to figure out who the killer is, they succumb to a spiraling atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia.
I won’t spoil the climax, or the revelation of who masterminded the elaborate plot, because I don’t need to. It’s not the point. Or anyway, not the one that I want to talk about.
What Christie is trying to do with this story is show that the line between so-called justice and outright vengeance is quite blurry. While the guilt of some of the strangers is obvious, it is less so for others, and some of them even struggle to remember whether they are guilty at all.
But it doesn’t matter. The mastermind is judge, jury, and executioner, meting out poetic justice (pun very much intended) to them all.
“To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock,
suffering the tortures of the damned…
was to me an exquisite pleasure.”
Actionable Insight*
The word “justice” has been corrupted almost beyond hope, to the point that it is little more than a synonym for vengeance.
Let’s see if we can rehabilitate it.
If we take for granted that no one is completely good or completely evil, then perhaps we can think of justice as a way to give people what they need. And if you are tempted to think that what some particular person needs is retribution, I suggest you interrogate your reasoning.
Is it because crimes are somehow undone when criminals are punished? Or is it because hurting a person who has caused harm improves them in some way?
Or is it because seeing a “wretched criminal” suffer brings you “an exquisite pleasure”?
The first two don’t usually hold up well under scrutiny, which means, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, the third is probably the truth.
Retributive justice is just vengeance in disguise. Why disguise it? Because we know that vengeance doesn’t make the world a better place. All it does is compound suffering.
So the next time you find yourself thirsting for so-called “justice,” ask yourself what it is you’re really after.
And then ask yourself what kind of person you really want to be.
*As a lover of literature, I must emphasize that the best way to truly absorb the wisdom of any work of literature is to actually read it, from start to finish, the way the author intended. I hope By the Books will occasionally inspire you to do just that.
This has always sat alongside Richard Connell's Most Dangerous Game, for me, being two incredibly simple ideas, masterfully laid out for a reader, without unnecessary embellishment of character or event. it's extremely potent in it's opening stages, but I fear the (slightly tacked on) ending is a little too on the nose. Regardless, it's status is well deserved.
For it's message, I've always approached the text being an indictment of capital punishment, especially given the choice of killer, showing that there is no difference between those before the bench and behind it. There were a series of miscarriages of justice through the early part of the twentieth century, and it is dubious that Christie would have arrived at her choices through coincidence - she has her faults, but she was also in possession of a keen eye for irony.
This is a beautiful truth. I was once asked to throw darts at a picture of someone I hated, which I did gleefully. When I was done, it was revealed that behind the first picture was another--of someone I loved, face now disfigured by my glee.