And Then There Were None Literary Analysis

Death is one of the main elements in gothic literature, and can be seen in And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and “Death of a Traveling Salesman” by Eudora Welty. In Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), ten characters were invited to Soldier Island, which is a gothic setting because it was a remote island. Throughout the story, characters start to turn up as missing and are pronounced dead. The whole story is a series of murders that are trying to be solved. In contrast, in Welty’s “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1936), a traveling salesman, R. J. Bowman, is traveling for a shoe company and wrecks his truck, which results in him finding his way to a little house with a woman outside that keeps speaking of someone named Sonny. …show more content…
The ten characters are invited to Soldier Island, a place none of them had ever heard of. When they get there, they realize it is an island that is off the mainland at high tide, which would make it harder to get to and from the island. They go into the house on the island and there is a nursery rhyme hanging in every room, which is about “ten little soldier boys” and how they died, which throughout the book, is a mysterious part of the setting, and gets explained a little more every time someone else is found dead. While reading “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” the setting starts off as normal, and then throughout the story, gets more mysterious, just as the setting in And Then There Were None. The short story starts off by Bowman driving his Ford down a dirt rutted path through Missouri, which is a pretty normal setting to start off with. The setting then changes to a woman’s house, and continues on to go to the back of the house, past a shed, to a “wilderness of thicket.” Overall, the setting is a major factor in both pieces of writing, and has major contributions to not only the characters fear’s, but also the way the story