| John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in1945, now lives in Dublin. He was the Irish Times literary editor once. In 2005, with the novel The Sea, he beat Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and other loud voice writers and won this year's Man Booker Prize. Booker Prize juries that The Sea has shown outstanding literature:textual beauty, formal beauty, and beauty of artistic conception; moreover, in the contemporary Irish social, historical and ideological context, other novels either discuss the deep relationship between science and narrative literary, or explore the common between literature and (painting) art, which these aspects create the imagination of space for readers. And it always is called Banville-style by critics.In my dissertation, I look at five of Banville's novels:Frames Trilogy (The Book of Evidence, Ghost and Athena), The Untouchable and The Sea, analyzing the narrators or heroes'names, conflicts reflecting on them between modernity and nationality, as well as memory and painting, in order to discuss how they focus on searching for Self, of which the result is untouchable.The dissertation is divided into three chapters:Chapterâ… , I discuss the problem of characters'name in works. Name is a sign of self. There is a confirmed relationship with self. However, because there are the contradictions and tragic tone contained in the name, this relationship is separated, just becoming playing games and entertaining tools for the readers, and leading to failure to self-search.In Chapterâ…¡, I discuss phenomenon of the double and self-division. There are large amounts of phenomenon of the double in these five novels. The double is a representation of narrators'self-division. Narrators are the Irish basically who place themselves in contradiction of modernity and nationality consciously or unconsciously in the expansionary modern sense of the present era. They are hesitating in going-home or leaving-home, keeping or breaking faith, and sexual orientation. Therefore, they can not have a lasting continuous identity. In inner depths, "I" and another self conflict each other and suppress each other, so that self can not have the two "I" achieve to integrate at the extreme anxiety.Finally, Chapterâ…¢interprets the impact of two factors of memory and painting on self-search. Memory represents enormous ability in the construction of self. It is a fight for oblivion, saves our own past; moreover it does not make the soul confine in the current utility and obtain liberation and freedom. Nevertheless, the optionality, deception and complex trigger mechanism of memory cause a confirmed relationship between memory and self to be broken. Secondly, the progress of ekphrasis to paintings erases frames, which is equivalent to erase the paintings'background, the social and historical situation. When it is projected to the existence condition of whole humanity, which is to show the lost of self:from losing home ethnic or cultural background to the loss of individual characteristics, to becoming such aggregate only be quantified with height, weight and age. |
