47 pages • 1 hour read
The Sea
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Literary Devices
First-Person Narrative
The Sea makes it clear that Max Morden is an unreliable narrator, and part of the novel’s interest is in exploring the issues associated with this: truth, subjectivity, perception, (mis)remembering, and the construction of identity. Max’s recollections are repeatedly proven to be mistaken and unreliable, and he constantly emphasizes the creative process involved in recollection. His first-person stream of consciousness charts sudden mood swings, contradictions, and drunken incoherence. Moreover, at times, it seems questionable whether he is even trying to be truthful. He attributes the names “Ballymore” and “Ballyless” to the town and the village in a flippant, playful manner in the opening pages, and toward the end of the book, it is revealed that “Max” is not his real name. The result is a deliberately internalized, subjective narrative, challenging the authority of narrative truth itself.
Setting
The seaside setting of the novel provides the text with its central metaphor. It is both a literal and a psychological landscape for Max, as it is the location of his memories and his present, having returned to the Cedars to both experience and remember it as a setting. The division between the Cedars and the chalets emblematizes the class distinctions that permeate the narrative, just as the juxtaposition of the same setting in the present and past highlights the subjectivity of Max’s story.
The seaside is a traditional place for family holidays in the UK and Ireland, especially in the early- and mid-20th century before cheap overseas travel. As such, it is deeply imbued with nostalgia in the popular consciousness and in literature—nostalgia both for a past era and for past individual childhoods. Often an idyllic setting, associated with good weather and holiday freedoms, the seaside was also a place where children of different social backgrounds might mix when outside the rigid structures of the domestic or educational space. Banville subverts the idyllic nostalgia of the seaside setting, turning this into a dark force for loss, regret, and shame in Max’s life.
Allusion
Banville’s text makes numerous allusions to other literary texts, mythology, and the visual arts. An art historian, Max tends to compare his experiences to works of art (most obviously Bonnard but also Duccio, Van Gogh, and others) and to arrange his memories into artistic tableaux (Connie, Chloe, and Grace in Botticelli’s Primavera, Chloe as the Egyptian Sphynx with Myles and Max as her attendants). The overall effect of these references is to suggest that memory is a process of creative composition, rather than of passive, objective recording. These descriptions also give the impression that Max is approaching, formulating, and expressing his most profound experience through the prism of existing works of art.
This is also true of the literary allusions that permeate the text. Max’s description of his last conversation with Anna contains allusions to Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” and Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” Max later describes himself as “darkness visible,” quoting Milton’s description of hell in Paradise Lost. Max draws on allusion in his most difficult moments, suggesting that he finds it easier to take refuge in the words and images of others at these times. His intellect and education become a defense against processing his own impressions.
Allusion also has a function of ironic contrast in The Sea. When Max runs back to Carlo to tell him of the twins’ drowning, a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest is interpolated in italics without being clearly attributed to either character or to the narrator. The line “Was’t well done?” is spoken by Ariel to Prospero at the end of the play, when Antonio’s son Ferdinand, who he believed to have been drowned, is restored to him. In Banville’s novel, the threatened tragedy has indeed happened. The question goes unanswered, and the novel leaves its meaning open.
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