Search results

1

John Banville’s „Ghosts”: “A different way of being alive”

100%

Kucała B.

Anglica Wratislaviensia

|

2017

|

issue 55

69-82

EN

This article analyses the ontological status of the characters who inhabit the world of John Banville’s novel Ghosts. While the problem of volatile selfhood recurs in Banville’s fiction, in this novel the very existence of the characters within the fictional world remains doubtful. It is argued here that the numerous metafictional elements in the text are central to its interpretation. The novel itself should be treated as a work in progress or a design for a novel rather than a completed project. The narrative initiates and ultimately resists familiar patterns; the characters’ peculiar way of being alive seems to stem from an intersection of empirical reality and an obscure realm of fantasy, imagination as well as textual and artistic allusions. Correspondingly, the narrator’s status as a literary character is ambiguous. The article suggests that the narrator is the most likely creator of the characters within the fictional world and is himself a playful author-substitute in the novel. In conclusion, a reading that treats Ghosts as a postmodern artefact appears to provide a viable framework for resolving the apparent contradictions and ambiguities in the status of the characters.

2

JOHN BANVILLE’S SHROUD: A DECONSTRUCTIONIST’S CONFESSION

100%

Kucała B.

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

|

2013

|

vol. 48

|

issue 2-3

93-102

EN

This article analyses John Banville’s novel Shroud as the protagonist’s autobiography which both follows and resists the confessional mode. Axel Vander, an ageing famous academic and champion of deconstruction, faces the necessity to confront his real self, although he spent his entire academic life contesting the concept of authentic selfhood. Alluding to the infamous case of Paul de Man, whose deconstructionist theories have been reinterpreted in the light of the revelation of his disgraceful wartime past, Banville’s novel presents a man who veers between the temptation to fall back on his theories in order to uphold a lifelong deception, and the impulse to reveal the truth and achieve belated absolution. The article examines Vander’s narrative as an attempt at a truthful account of his life, combined with the conflicting tendency to resist self-exposure. Despite the protagonist’s ambivalent and selfcontradictory motivations, his account of his life belongs to the category of confessional writing, with its accompanying religious connotations. It is argued that the protagonist’s public denial of authentic selfhood is linked to his private evasion of moral culpability.

3

Memory and the Splitting of the Self in John Banville’s The Sea

87%

Kucała B.

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature

|

2016

|

vol. 40

|

issue 1

DE

Der Band enthält die Abstracts ausschließlich in englischer Sprache.

EN

This article explores the problem of the self in The Sea by John Banville. The narrator’s professed lack of a stable identity coexists with a multiplication of his different “selves.” It is argued that the splitting of the self in Banville’s novel is more complicated than the split between a narrating self and the subject of narration, common to retrospective first-person narratives. Due to the intensely visual and time-defying nature of his memory, the protagonist seems to revive the past and achieves the sense of a simultaneous existence as two beings. The narrator’s need to locate himself at a fixed point in his narrative, combined with his inability to adopt a definitive perspective, results in a permanent erosion of identity.

FR

Le numéro contient uniquement les résumés en anglais.

RU

Том содержит аннотацию только на английском языке.

Refine search results

1 Anglica Wratislaviensia

1 Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature

1 Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

3 Kucała B.

1 2017

1 2016

1 2013

John Banville’s „Ghosts”: “A different way of being alive”

JOHN BANVILLE’S SHROUD: A DECONSTRUCTIONIST’S CONFESSION

Memory and the Splitting of the Self in John Banville’s The Sea