A Postmodern Study Of John Banville’s Frames Trilogy

John Banville (1945-) is one of the most brilliant contemporary Irish writers. The innovativenessand distinctiveness of the form as well as the joyful reflections his novels bring us make othercontemporaneous Irish writers incomparable with Banville. He is especially noted for his FramesTrilogy which for its perfect language and complex plots wins him the crown of laurels. In FramesTrilogy readers fail to see the depiction of vivid plots, the delineation of round characters and the useof narrative techniques that traditional novels are supposed to have. Instead they see the discontinuousplots, the fragments of language, the pictorial collage, multilingual collage and fiction form collageand the elements of self-reflexivity and uncertainty that are the characteristic demonstration of thepostmodern novels.This thesis attempts to discuss Frames Trilogy in four postmodern perspectives, such as languagegame, collage, parodic study and uncertainty with the postmodern literary theories such as languagegame theory, self-reflexivity theory and nihilism theory. Through the textual analysis, this thesisdemonstrates the self-exploration and the quest of the protagonist in order to deepen theunderstanding and studies of Banville’s postmodern wrting techniques and to enrich the study ofFrames Trilogy.The thesis holds that, as a postmodern writer, Banville subverts and deconstructs the traditionalnarrative model by applying language games and collage in many aspects; furthermore, hereconstructs an anti-novel speciality by adopting the parodic and meta-narrative texts. Through thefracture between the language signifier and signified, the centerlessness of collage text and theperplexed relation of self and the other, Banville expresses his anxiety over the fragmented self andthe postmodern world. We also see Banville’s extreme skepticism about the world he lived.