The day of judgment is at hand

The phrase "The day of judgment is at hand" first appears in the novel as a drunken prophecy delivered to William Henry Blore. On the slow train from Plymouth to Oakbridge, an elderly seafaring gentleman, having consumed too much drink, rouses from sleep to announce, "Watch and pray. Watch and pray. The day of judgment is at hand." Collapsing onto the platform, he looks up at Blore with immense dignity and repeats, "I'm talking to you, young man. The day of judgment is very close at hand." Blore dismisses the warning with a complacent thought: "He's nearer the day of judgment than I am!" The narrator immediately undercuts this confidence, noting that "there, as it happens, he was wrong." This moment establishes the phrase as a direct, ironic foreshadowing of the deaths that will follow, and it marks Blore as a man who fatally underestimates the danger he is walking into.

Thematic Resonance and the Lust to Kill

The phrase echoes the deepest psychological drives of the novel's true murderer, Lawrence John Wargrave. In his manuscript confession, Wargrave describes his own nature as "a mass of contradictions," possessing both a "strong sense of justice" and a "definite sadistic delight in seeing or causing death." He confesses to a "lust to kill" that he has known from an early age, an impulse that found a sanctioned outlet in his career as a hanging judge. The "day of judgment" is, for Wargrave, not a divine event but a personal vocation. He sees himself as an artist in crime, and his elaborate scheme on Indian Island is his masterpiece—a self-appointed final judgment on those he deems guilty but untouchable by the law. The phrase thus becomes the motto of his homicidal crusade, a secularized, perverted version of divine retribution.

The Inevitability of the End

As the murders progress, the characters themselves begin to articulate a sense of an approaching, inescapable end. General John Gordon Macarthur, sitting by the sea and waiting for his own death, tells Vera Claythorne, "None of us are going to leave the island. That's the plan." He speaks of "the blessed relief when you know that you've done with it all—that you haven't got to carry the burden any longer." For him, the day of judgment is not a threat but a release from guilt. Later, when Vera and Philip Lombard discover Dr. Armstrong's drowned body and realize they are the only two left alive, Vera whispers, "There's no one on the island—no one at all—except us two." Lombard replies, "So we know where we are, don't we?" and Vera thinks, "This is the end." The phrase has shifted from a drunken man's warning to a shared, fatalistic recognition that the judgment they have all been dreading has finally arrived.

The Final Judgment and the Brand of Cain

Wargrave's own death is the culmination of the judgment motif. After staging his own murder and then killing the remaining victims, he writes his confession, seals it in a bottle, and casts it into the sea. He then arranges his own suicide to look like the tenth and final murder, shot through the forehead. In his confession, he identifies the third clue that might lead the police to the truth: "The manner of my death marking me on the forehead. The brand of Cain." This biblical reference—the mark God placed on Cain after he murdered his brother Abel—transforms Wargrave's death into a final, ironic act of self-judgment. He has played God, executing judgment on others, but in the end, he marks himself as the original murderer. The "day of judgment" that the old man on the train prophesied has come for all of them, and the judge who believed he was above judgment is finally, and literally, branded by his own hand.