105 pages • 3 hours read
Agatha ChristieDeath On The Nile
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Sun and the Moon
Both Jackie and Simon use the analogy of the sun and the moon to explain Simon’s marriage to Linnet. Glamorous, glorious Linnet is like the sun (blinding, powerful, blotting out everything else in the sky) while the humbler Jackie is like the moon (smaller, not as impressive, disappears when the sun is in the sky). Thus, when Simon became acquainted with Linnet, Jackie “disappeared” for him.
The analogy works on other levels, as well. The sun represents daylight and associated things: clarity, straightforwardness, masculinity. Linnet has negative traits, but subterfuge and deceit are not among them. She is honest, straightforward, generous, and rather oblivious to others. Additionally, she has some masculine attributes: Simon views her as a possessive and emasculating woman, and she is described as having a uniquely unwomanly business sensibility.
The moon, on the other hand, is associated with the night, the feminine, the occult, and the emotions. Jackie is someone who makes secret plans which are executed during the night. Although she is capable of clear-sighted reasoning, Jackie is also prone to dark, overwhelming emotions; she is also presented as feminine, since Simon implies that he feels as if he possesses Jackie rather than the other way around.
Jackie’s Gun(s)
Jackie’s gun, which she first shows to Poirot in the garden at Assuan, is a symbol for the constant temptation of evil—and, at the same time, of the possibility for redemption.
Jackie carries the first gun in her handbag, seemingly vacillating about whether she will use it or not; although her plan all along has been to help Simon kill Linnet, her expressions of suffering and appeal in the days leading up to the murder are probably best interpreted as indicating her inner conflict about this decision. The unfired gun is like a physical manifestation of her as-yet unrealized murderous plans; at the same time, as long as she leaves it in her bag, unused, it also represents the possibility of turning back from those plans. After Jackie has used the gun, she kicks it away as if “she sort of hate[s] it” (201).
Later, in the more depraved phase of her killing career, Jackie uses implements belonging to other people, which suggests that, on some level, she feels alienated from her role as a cold-blooded killer. At the end of the novel, when Jackie escapes the justice of the legal system, she does so by killing Simon and herself with a second, identical pearl-handled pistol. Since she smiles at Poirot (who has served as a kind of spiritual counsellor throughout her dark journey) before ending her life, and he clearly views allowing her to commit suicide as an act of mercy, the gun appears in a positive light. Jackie has already told Poirot that she has let evil in, and no longer finds killing difficult; perhaps killing herself is her last chance for a partial redemption. She ends her life before it can continue on in an even more depraved way.
Related Titles
By Agatha Christie
