Aging Narrative In Banville’s The Sea And Ancient Light

As one of the most prominent Irish writers,John Banville has gained an international acclaim for his unique writing style.Despite being in his seventies,Banville’s enthusiasm and motivation for creating fiction have not diminished along with his aging process.Besides,as he grows older,Banville becomes more concerned with the elderly,with a number of novels featuring men in their sixties,among which two prize-winning novels,The Sea and Ancient Light,are particularly noteworthy.Based on Gérard Genette and Shen Dan’s narrative theories,this thesis aims to explore the narrative techniques Banville applied in his aging narrative demonstrated in The Sea and Ancient Light.Chapter One analyses the focalizations of the aging protagonists.Banville’s frequent use of the retrospective first-person narration enables the aging protagonists Max and Cleave to own a double focalization of their reminiscence of past events.The external focalization as narrating-I allows Max and Cleave to reinterpret their pasts and form a deeper understanding of life in aging years,while the internal focalization as experiencing-I restricts the aging narrators to a closer perception of reliving their lost youth.Chapter Two focuses on the unreliability of the aging narrators.Conscious of the memory decline of aging characters,Banville intentionally chooses unreliable narrators to misreport their incomplete past events.The misremembrance of Max and Cleave becomes more noticeable as they age,and their loss of details essential to an original past proves that the distorted memories resulted from aging make themselves less reliable while recalling.Besides,their imagination and invention as the way to reconstruct their pasts further deepens the unreliability of their narrations on the one hand,but demonstrates their attempt to create new meaning for themselves in aging period on the other hand.Chapter Three explores the narrative time of both novels.The juxtaposition and interlacement of the time present and the time past delineates a non-linear network of narrative time,showing Banville’s disagreement with the conception of cultural narrative that regards aging as a linear decline of narrative.The pause of narrative speed affords the aging narrators a chance to reflect on their pasts during reminiscence and acquire a deeper understanding of their lives in their later years.Through the analysis of the narrative techniques in The Sea and Ancient Light,this thesis argues that Banville’s subtle narrative approaches present readers with a complex and diverse world of the elderly.This suggests that Banville does not regard aging merely as a period of decline in life,but also as a time to life review and personal growth.The interpretation of aging narrative in Banville’s novels is of significance for understanding the uniqueness of his works and how Western literature portrays the lifestyles of the elderly.At the same time,it provides some insight into how to better treat and support older people in the era of global aging.