Alex Garland’s The Beach deploys numerous references to a variety of other texts and even films; the purpose of the present essay is to discuss how The Beach ”relates” and ”responds” to a selection of these ”texts”. In order to successfully explore how the intertexts blend, clash and perform in Garland’s novel the essay employs established ideas of intertextuality. By employing some of the ideas and models of (especially) Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes the essay investigates how and with what results The Beach engages in intertextual play. The essay discusses how Garland’s novel takes up and repeats (”Same-Same,...”), challenges, transforms and inverts (”...But Different”) prior works. Details and subjects discussed include e.g. the practice of othering, the meaning of the map(s), “man’s” inherent darkness and complex relations to ”reality”. The essay explores how the novel answers its intertexts and what new questions it poses in its dialogue with its intertexts rather than simply applying the subject-object binary terms of cause and effect. I highlighted the fact that The Beach carries a variety of intertexts, the playful, elastical and differential relations to which make the novel more than a ”copy” or a result of hegemonic influence. Moreover, I discuss how the intertexts add information from the intertextual dimensions, helping the reader to understand Garland’s novel and the generation(s) it portrays. Being a dynamic site The Beach seems to exist in a multi-dimensional space among Barthes’ notion of infinitely circulating texts and appears to be a new, glowing mosaic of past quotations.