Banville's Fiction Comes of Age as It Lays to Rest Old

Abstract

For twenty-five years, John Banville's protagonists have tried to come to grips with the other brother/shadow self. If the protagonist can come to grips with the shadow figure he can create, for a moment, order in his chaotic world, as do Gabriel Godkin, Copernicus, Kepler. When the character fails to embrace the brother/other se!f, he destroys and se!f-destructs, as do Gabriel Swan, Victor Maskell and, for a time, Freddie Monigomery. Freddie Montgomery, as he attempts to lay to rest old ghosts, is a recurring figure not onty in the three novels in which he figures--Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena-but, in a sense, Freddie and his shadow self appear as archetypes in all of Banville's fiction, creating an allegorical tale that is long overdue for attention, especially with regard to its Irish nature. Using Jung's concept of the Shadow combined with the implications of Chaos Theory, I analyze the story beneath the stories -the Irish allegory.-in the fiction of John Banville, a premier Irish novelist.