The Flawed Return: A Study of the Homecoming Theme in John Banville’s 'The Sea'

John Banville’s 2005 Man Booker Prize winning novel The Sea is, among other reasons, a remarkable work of fiction for the whimsicality of the homecoming journey engaged in by the protagonist Max Morden. If traditionally the return describes a homeward trip where departure and arrival points overlap, in this novel the narrator’s uneasiness with his self makes this trajectory shadowy in such a way that his travelling does not depict a circle but a spiral, where the curving line comes very close to the departure point, without touching it. In my essay I examine the peculiarities of this uncommon route that is mainly originated by the protagonist’s rejection of his original family—located too low in the social ladder for his expectations—and his dogged resolve to replace it with a fake one, more in keeping with his haughty temperament. My work is basically split into two sections: in the first one, psychology has become the tool of analysis to study the ways in which Max’s journey may be considered to conform to the general norm of subjects engaged in a homeward trip. In the second, a mythological approach has been used in order to offer supplementary clarifications to Morden’s bizarre return home.