Vazquez 1

Arantza Vazquez

Ms. Starry

English 9 Honors

30 August 2017

Vera Claythorne

Not everyone changes throughout their lives. Every story needs at least one stereotypical

character: the liar, the one the helps others, the wise one, the one that does what people tell them

to do, and so on. Vera Claythorne was one of them. In Agatha Christie’s story,​ And Then There

Were None,​ Vera was a stock character.

Vera Claythorne was mysterious since the beginning. “Cyril’s head, bobbing up and

down, swimming to the rock… she wouldn’t be in time… She must not think of Hugo” (Christie

5). This shows that Vera has secrets which makes the reader think, could Vera have more

secrets? Later in the novel, an unknown voice announced what murderers everyone had done.

Most of the people with her explained what happened and confessed if they were guilty or not.

Vera was one of the few people that played innocent instead of confessing what really happened,

which brought conundrum on herself. “Cyril Hamilton was forbidden to swim out far. One day

my attention was distracted… I couldn’t get there in time.. But it wasn’t my fault” (Christie 66).

At the end of the story the reader finds out that Vera did murder but “murder isn’t what most

people think… she'd take a kid out to sea and let it drown” (Christie 291). She didn’t kill anyone

in the way people thought. Vera kept secrets from everyone from beginning to end which made

her suspicious.
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And Then There Were None​ is a murder mystery novel. Vera added enigma to the novel

which affected the theme. As a stock character, the reader wouldn’t know if she was ever going

to change until reading the whole book. Something must have happened in her past that made her

think that “the sea… sometimes so cruel… dragged you down… drowned…” (Christie 35). Who

drowned? The reader may ask. This increases the mystery and suspense about Vera Claythorne

and what she did in the past. Everyone in the island is guilty, they all have committed a murder.

The novel’s theme is about justice and how everyone is punished. Even if it was very cruel, Vera

was punished because of what she did in her past, drowning a kid for love. She becomes a great

part of the theme since she was technically the last person to die. At the end, Vera was punished

like all of the others. “...One little soldier boy left all alone; he went and hanged himself and then

there were none” (Christie introduction).

Vera was a great stock character for this book. By keeping secrets from others and having

a dark past she was able to add uncertainty to who the murderer was because of her different

theories. She impacted the novel by keeping secrets to herself and not letting the reader know

about them until everyone else did.