Theoretical Analysis: Psychoanalytic Theory

An ominous voice booms from behind a wall declaring one’s deepest secrets to a room of otherwise pleasant strangers. The paranoia in them builds with each word that echoes in the halls. What do they do next? What can they deny? What are the consequences? Agatha Christie not only tackles the topics of justice, guilt, and morality in her novel And Then There Were None, but she also knits together a gradual and suspenseful psychological downfall within the pages of her book as well. The novel brings the unconscious to light as it demonstrates how guilt and paranoia go hand-in-hand by including an exposure of secrets through the announcement, by causing characters to go mad in their guilt and fears, and by specifically causing the psychological collapse of Vera Claythorne. 

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The premise of the novel could not exist without the clear psychological connection between guilt and paranoia. The characters in And Then There Were None all have a guilty secret they have repressed; the readers come to find out that each is responsible for the death or deaths of other people yet escaped justice for their hand in the death. Despite the denials of these accusations, each character is haunted by their past for the duration of their time on the island. It is as if their paranoia is not necessarily for their impending punishment, but it is rather rooted in their knowledge that they are indeed guilty. Therefore, it becomes obvious that their guilt drives the paranoia and eventual psychological collapse of the characters since they know they will come face to face with their death. Because all the characters got away with something that had no retributions, the element of secret nature of their actions seems to represent each character’s id, the portion of the personality that is driven by pleasure and is repressed by other personality levels. With this in mind, the id is not meant to be in the public, thus an announcement of the character’s past sins allows, “The guilt in some is rekindled; in others… it is externalized- spoken aloud for all to hear,” (Hardesty, 18).  The announcement then acts as a way to strip the characters of their regulating ego since what the ego tries to suppress is already revealed, thus their guilt for these actions causes a growing sense of paranoia.

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 The relationship between guilt and paranoia continues with the characters’ constant exposure to the deaths of their fellow guests. With each death, fears grow. Two characters in particular exhibit nervous tendencies that bolster this idea: Emily Brent and Dr. Armstrong. After the murder of Roger and before her own, Emily Brent has a flurry of concerned thoughts that conclude with, “Dying? But she wasn’t going to die! The others would die-yes-but not she, Emily Brent,” (Christie, 193). Her fears manifested into a repression of the fearful feelings that she was experiencing, and her concerns drove her mad. Emily Brent is a particularly important character to discuss in the case of a psychological analysis of this novel since she embodies the ideals of the superego. A virtuous and pious woman, Brent continually makes it known that she is “holier than thou” and condemns her fellow guests and their behavior; she never notes her own flaws. However, she meets her death just like every other person on the island. This demonstrates how in the eyes of justice, a sin is a sin. Her perfect exterior had an equivalent interior, or id, as everyone else. In the case of Dr. Armstrong, his paranoia drove him to his death the most literally out of all characters since he puts his trust in the murderer only to drown. While the other characters suspect that he is simply trying to run away or he is the murderer himself, the murderer reveals in the end that they gained Armstrong’s trust and killed him as a result. His sin of course, was killing a patient during surgery while intoxicated. This guilt is evident in his paranoia since he fully knows he is guilty but is surprised anyone else knows. He thinks, “But who could have known about it -- after all these years?” (Christie, 72). In this case, he does not repress his guilt but rather owns up to it. All he does is try to keep it a secret from the others without denying it himself.  

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Vera Claythorne is the character that most demonstrates how guilt and paranoia go together in the novel. From beginning to end, she seems to be the character most suspicious of others and the situation. In the beginning, she is the one who continually notices the disappearance of the figures with each death. She even consults others to confirm she counted correctly which foreshadows a growing madness. Christie continually uses consciousness passages to show Vera’s reaction to the deaths which gives the reader insight into her own psyche. It becomes clear that her guilt is driving her crazy since her backstory is slowly revealed as the novel progresses. Aside from her own death, Vera’s psychological collapse can be seen through her actions leading up to her death. Killing Lombard, the only person she trusted on the island, stands as a rich example of her descent into psychological madness that ultimately left her all alone. This brings up a crucial point of the entire novel: the most guilty die last. This is confirmed by the murder’s letter as they note that the first two deaths were not brutal because he didn’t think Martson had a moral compass and that, “Mrs. Rodgers… acted very largely under the influence of her husband,” (Christie, 293).  However, when discussing Vera’s death, the murderer notes, “It was an interesting psychological experiment. Would the consciousness of her own guilt, the state of nervous tension on having just shot a man, be sufficient, together with the hypnotic suggestion of the surroundings, to cause her to take her own life?” (Christie, 298). This ultimately goes to show that the repression of her past hidden deep in her id coming to the surface ruined Vera. Her final thoughts before hanging herself were about the young boy she killed. This is significant because the three deaths she would ultimately be responsible for, Cyril’s, Lombard’s, and her own, were all driven by her id. Her pleasure and longing for self-preservation was a driving factor of her motivation so much so that she would kill the child she was a governess for in order to be with the man she loved, kill someone she trusted to ensure she could stay alive, and kill herself so the poem could be satisfied. 

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There is no denying that Christie’s And Then There Were None reveals a psychological journey for each of the characters involved. From the revealing of their guilt, to the conflict of the three levels of personality, and to Vera’s psychological collapse, it is clear that the use of guilt and paranoia combined drives the plot as a whole.