The Sea

The sea is the central symbol of Banville’s text, highlighted by the novel’s name. In a narrative concerned with both sexual awakening and the experience of death, the sea symbolizes the vast, immutable power of life’s natural forces. The sea is connected both to the overwhelming animal urges that affect the various characters and to the inevitability of death. It is a timeless constant and also a traditional symbol of the passage of time. The cyclical nature of the tides marks the ebb and flow of memory and is emblematic of the ways in which these oppose the linear trajectory of chronological time. The shifting sea is also symbolic of the changeability of memory, perception, and identity. In its association with oblivion, the sea at once attracts and repels the narrator: As the natural force that swallowed up Chloe and Myles, Max finds it both a frightening emblem of death and the physical locus of their existence in memory. In the opening lines of the novel, Max repeatedly pulls back from the sea that consumed his childhood companions (“I would not swim, no, not ever again” [4]), but at the end of Part 1, he feels himself being drawn irresistibly toward it (“I hear your siren’s song.