Quick Quote: Barthes on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The reader will perhaps recall a novel by Agatha Christie in which all the invention consisted of concealing the murderer beneath the use of the first person of the narrative. The reader looked for him behind every 'he' in the plot: he was all the time hidden under the 'I.' Agatha Christie knew perfectly well that, in the novel, the 'I' is usually a spectator and that it is the 'he' who is the actor. 

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, tr. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970], pp. 34-5.