Bibliogr. s. 22-23

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.