The role of female characters in the narrator’s quest for identity in John Banville’s eclipse

Abstract

Eclipse is a novel that contributes to John Banville’s idiosyncratic worlds of fiction in presenting the reader with a male narrator who engages in the telling of a journey back to the spatial context of his childhood in an attempt to retrieve what he deems to have lost, his true self. Criticism on the novel has dealt with the narrator’s narcissism, the novel’s narrative style and technique, its modernist/postmodernist allegiance, its intertextual and intermedial nature and its status as trauma narrative. A few attempts have also been made at revisiting the novel from the standpoint of gender, although women have been invariably read as subject to the male gaze, whether as mundane objects of desire or idealized objets d’art. This article aims at showing that women in Eclipse refuse to be mere erotic or artistic objects in a male story. In my view, the narrative centrality of the male figure is progressively challenged by the female characters, both puzzling and fascinating, who stubbornly keep on intruding into the narrator’s solipsistic activities, eventually break free from their usual position as objects of the male gaze and redirect the narrator’s quest and his narrative into an unexpected, moving finale.