Conclusion

Abstract

In attempting to account for his devotion to the first-person narrative form, Banville has spoken of a ‘monotonous murmur’ in his head, and of how he feels he must translate this murmur into prose ‘over and over again’ in order to do it justice, to ‘get it right’ (Banville, 2006b: 201; 203). It is this murmur, he says, which is the source of his fiction: ‘I’m not interested in politics, I’m not interested in society, I’m not interested in Man. I seem to be just interested in this voice that goes on and on and on in my head’ (201). Banville’s avowed lack of artistic concern with the world outside of his own consciousness is not so much a restriction upon the scope of his vision as an intensification of its focus. His work, as this book has explored, is concerned with the narcissistic character, and is likewise narcissistic in its forms and techniques. His style is a highly self-conscious one; just as his narrators are obsessively inward-directed, his language is always acutely concerned with its own elegance, its own ambiguities and evasions. The result is a radically self-enclosed body of work. As he put it in an Irish Times article following the death of Samuel Beckett: ‘All literary artists in their heart want to write about nothing, to make an autonomous art, independent of circumstance’ (Banville, 1989b: 18).