Titlebook: John Banville‘s Narcissistic Fictions; The Spectral Self Mark O’Connell Book 2013 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Li

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Introduction, writing remains fundamentally insular. With the exception of . (1976) and . (1981), all of his novels have been written in the first-person confessional form, a narrative mode that attempts — or seems to attempt — the communication of an essence which is, at its core, incommunicable. In the typical

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,Banville’s Narcissists,m of smugness. It would be much closer to the truth, however, to describe it as an exhaustive anxiety, or cluster of anxieties, about the self. In most post-Freudian psychoanalytic writing about the condition, it is seen as a way of looking at the world and one’s place in it that is ultimately dimin

美丽的写

Missing Twins,act that humans were originally twofold beings with four arms, four legs, two sets of sexual organs and ‘two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck’ (Plato, 1997: 473). These creatures, completely spherical in form, were so strong and arrogant that they saw fit to launch an offensive upon the gods

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The False Self,on came at a late stage in the novel’s composition. He acknowledged that, at some point, he was ‘really going to have to stop dealing with these inauthentic men who have made themselves’, and went on to speak about the pervasiveness of inauthenticity among artists:

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Shame,ssion is something that this chapter will aim to make explicit: that shame is a key issue in Banville’s work and that it is inseparable from that of narcissism. It is a central affect throughout the ., prominent to varying degrees in the protagonists of each of the novels and, while this chapter wil

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Narrative Narcissism,f their inner lives and their interactions with one another. The understanding of the concept previously employed has, in other words, been a more or less exclusively psychological one. The present chapter is intended to broaden the scope of the discussion to encompass a consideration of formal and

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Shame,arcissism. It is a central affect throughout the ., prominent to varying degrees in the protagonists of each of the novels and, while this chapter will make reference to many of these works in support of its argument, it is . and . that will provide the foundation of this discussion.

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