Traces of Stigma in John Banville's The Sea

Despite acknowledging the centrality of Anna's illness in studies of John Banville's The Sea, scholars have not attended to the close relationship between Anna's cancer and her husband Max's process of self-stigmatization. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's notion of the trace, I analyze Max's experience of his wife's illness to show how Banville depicts disease imprinting psychic traces not only on the patient but also on his/her family. My main contention is that an assay of Max's self-stigma creates new insights into The Sea that show how the novel's superb reflections on disease, stigma, pain, suffering, age, death, and artistic creation promote a narrative destabilization of time categories. This destabilization underscores the fact that consciousness of finitude is inherent in the human experience-not just in the late stages of one's life but throughout the entire life cycle.