Past And Present:the Uncanny In Recalling The Memory In John Banville’s The Sea

John Banville is renowned for his poetic language in composing novels.He is considered to be one of the most imaginative novelists in the English language today and one of the talented in contemporary Irish literature.The Sea is one of the most representative work of John Banville,which won the Booker Prize in 2005.It is a story about memory and loss,exploring the self in reminiscent of the memory.Despite of the popularity of the novel,the researches on the novel are not fully covered in depth.The aim of this paper is to explore John Banville’s novel The Sea and to find out how the memory and the self are constructed based on Freud’s idea about the uncanny and further explore the uncanny mentality of the protagonist.Freud’s paper “The Uncanny” analyzing Hoffmann’s story The Sandman enlightens me.Therefore,this paper tries to employ the uncanny theory to explore the memory construction and self construction of the protagonist and analyze the uncanny mentality of the protagonist.First of all,the paper introduces the background information,shares a summary of literature review home and abroad,elaborates the theory of uncanny and clarifies the purpose and significance of the research.Then,the memory construction is explored as fragmented memory and reconstructed memory.The memory is fragmented in three intertwining and intersecting story lines--life in the childhood,life with his wife and life in the remaining years,which reflect the fragmented mental states of the protagonist due to the past traumatic experiences.Also,the protagonist reconstructs the memory in order to relieve the painful loss and seek consolation with the past.In The Sea,the uncanny mentality is incarnated throughout the memory journey,during which the self construction is greatly colored with the uncanny elements,which can explain for the fragmented and confused state of the protagonist,as the self is involved in the uncanny play of dividing and doubling in an attempt to search for itself while is incapable of fully apprehending the presence of selfhood.Among traveling to different time dimensions,Max often had the confused feelings between the unconscious and the conscious,here and there,self and the other.The self identity wavers and falters.Next,it comes to a detailed analysis on the uncanny mentality of the protagonist,in which different facets from the uncanny theory such as heimlich and unheimlich,the return of the repressed,the repetition impulse and the double are employed.First,Max is uncanny about the recurrence of familiar curse-the death of Anna and the death of the twins,hence Max can not achieve his unity with the family and with the wholeness.Secondly,Bonnard is used as a double of Max to indicate the death destiny of the family,in which the identification engenders the uncanny.Thirdly,when Max comes back to the Cedars trying to explore memory,however,in those nights,he unconsciously and repeatedly goes to the sea.“walking in to the sea” is the return of the repressed.The uncanny makes Max roam about in the fragmented and reconstructed memory,through which Max is in a lasting state of confusion and hesitation of his self identity,and tries to seek consolation in memory and pursue the wholeness and unity but in vain.The attempt to bridge the gap and to rehabilitate the lost unity and harmony through fanciful compositions is doomed to fail as harmony can never be rehabilitated and meaning does not prevail.In the end,the aesthetics of the uncanny theory is recommended for more researchers to probe into the mentality for interpreting more works in a fresh viewpoint.