Poetry into Fiction, Fiction into Poetry: Intertextual Connections in Agatha Christie’s "Endless Night"

This article maps and investigates the network of intertextual connections activated in Agatha Christie’s standalone psychological thriller Endless Night (1967), ranging from poems by William Blake and T. S. Eliot to the tarot. While most of these literary and cultural referents participate in the symbolic dynamics of this text through explicit quotes, others are evoked more subtly; yet their presence can be traced and their role analysed. The resulting literary inquiry aims to shed light onto the ways in which Endless Night conjures up an ambience of superstition while exploring the theme of evil in close connection with its unreliable narrator’s lack of self-awareness. Probing the contact zone between psychological realism and spiritual symbolism, the novel even gestures back towards the realm of Greek tragedy, in which the psychological thriller is firmly rooted, as shown by the archetypal story of Oedipus.