The Sea

The narrative of Banville’s novel shifts back and forth between three main time frames: the narrative present, with the aging Max at the Cedars after Anna’s death; Max’s life-changing childhood summer with the Graces; and the period of Anna’s illness. The fluidity and rapidity of these shifts gives the sense that Max is living multiple periods of his life simultaneously and that the workings of his memory ensure that the present is always colored by the past. Through this flowing style and structure, Banville involves the reader in Max’s sensations of experiencing different times simultaneously and the mutual influence of these thoughts and memories.

The novel makes it immediately and overtly clear that Max is an unreliable narrator. Indeed, the self-reflective nature of the narrative is matched by the novel’s conscious reflexive concern about the nature of storytelling. The flippancy with which he names the town and the village at the beginning of the text highlights the narrator’s ability to alter facts (consciously or unconsciously) as best serves his purposes and points out the hidden artifice of a fictional narrative, especially one purporting to be autobiographical.

The opening pages establish Max as a self-absorbed character, even for a man suffering bereavement and engaged in a self-descriptive narrative. The parallel time frames of the novel invite comparison of Max as a son with Max as a father, pointing out the ways in which he prioritizes his own experiences over an appreciation of others as equally real people. Just as he sees his parents only through his own lens as their son, he sees his daughter, Claire, as an extension of his own frustrated ambitions and responds with jealous resentment to any attempt on her part to deviate from his vision of what she ought to be. He refuses to acknowledge Claire’s grief for Anna’s death and cuts her off from a shared bereavement in order to immerse himself in his own memories at the Cedars.

It is clear from the outset that class is a strong component of Max’s idolization of the Graces, a feature that is essential to the key theme of The Search for Identity: Belonging and Homecoming. Their different holiday accommodations mark the different social standing of the two families. Max’s shame at his “vulgar” parents marks his ruthless social ambition and his sense of inferiority. Max imaginatively casts the newly arrived family as “the Graces” in part because of the social redemption and elevation that he believes his friendship with them will bring, Instead, he finds himself being patronized and rejected.

Max’s profession of disgust with his body, and others’, plays into another important theme introduced in this section: Max’s sexual awakening as a young boy, which is inextricably tied up with his first experience of death. In parallel, his disturbing descriptions of physicality recall the physical decline and death of Anna, associated with her own dark artistic creations while in the hospital. In Max’s rambling reminiscences, his mind wanders outside the limitations of time, while his own body and his remembrance of his wife’s illness pull him back into the world of physical decay. At the same time, his mind is tied up with and limited by his body. There is not a clear dichotomy between the two in the novel, as memories fade with time and age, but in seeking refuge in the past, Max tries to escape from his own mortality and that of his dead wife. The adult Max states that his younger self enjoyed the world more vividly, aware of the future promise of sexual, personal, and social self-realization. While his remembered narratives actually reveal a different past to the reader—that the young Max is in fact frightened and conflicted by his experiences of incipient adulthood—this nostalgia for an imagined past forms part of Max’s pattern of regret and personal dissatisfaction.