The Sea

The Sea reveals Max's search for identity and self-knowledge through his need to feel a sense of belonging and find a place where he feels “at home” in himself. As Max himself, somewhat obliquely, says, “I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone” (216). The focus of the self-reflective narrative is a paradoxical search for self by a character who has always “wanted to be someone else” and who considers “the notion of an essential, singular self [a]s problematic” (216). These self-reflections suggest a character who feels a sense of alienation from himself and feels he “never had a personality, not in the way other people have, or think they have” (216). Max describes his sense of self as a void, an absence, reminiscent of the “momentous nothing” of the novel’s closing lines.

Max’s desire to climb socially means that he does not feel a sense of belonging in his own family or class, which he quite openly despises, nor in the company of those who he aspires to be like, who make him feel inferior. In a deep sense, this social insecurity causes Max to feel like an imposter or fraud. This false sense of self is reinforced by the discovery that Max is more an alias than a name: The narrator has become so detached from his true roots that he discards his original name. The novel suggests that Max has chosen “Max” because it furthers his aim to seem of a higher social class than he is. Another reading is that Anna has chosen this name for Max because his real name reveals his background and is “unsuitable” for him as her partner. If true, she is both Max’s accomplice and his critic, reinforcing his sense of social shame and repeating the inferiority-superiority pattern that characterizes his relationships, especially with women.

Banville creates a motif of homecoming to illustrate the search for self and how social ambition is an obstacle to Max’s sense of a comfortable or coherent self-identity. Although Max ostensibly identifies his journey to the Cedars in terms of homecoming, he is traveling back to a “home” of his own willful invention—a fragile, insubstantial construct at which he can never truly arrive. It is an irony of the narrative that the place of “home” Max returns to in order to seek out self-understanding is a holiday location—in many ways the escapist opposite of “home”—and this reinforces its unattainability. His stay at the Cedars arouses memories of his childhood social insecurities, mirrored by his own fussy social observations of the Colonel and Miss Vavasour, and his discomfort around the patrician Bun. This propensity of class anxiety to falsify identity and memory is also reflected in the other residents of the Cedars, Rose and Colonel Blunden. Rose, like Max, has had a change of name and is pretending to belong to a higher social class. The Colonel, too, appears to be living a lie in order to escape his own humble origins.

Max’s dream of “homecoming” inspires his trip back to the Cedars. In his dream, his “homecoming” is forever deferred. He sees himself as stumbling interminably and hopelessly through the snow: “The journey did not end, I arrived nowhere, and nothing happened” (25). Banville draws on well-established literary and psychoanalytic patterns here. The motif of the hero’s homecoming as a moment of reckoning and revelation has been a key metaphor for self-searching since Homer’s Odyssey. Freudian psychoanalysis sees the return to origins as a means for healing and self-knowledge; of course, Max is not returning to his real origins but to the Cedars, the location and symbol of his wish to “better himself.” Class ambition has led him to snub his true origins altogether and leaves him in a state of limbo, as his dream reveals. As Max himself admits, “I will not deny it, I have always been ashamed of my origins” (207).