Mapping Grief and Memory in John Banville’s The Sea

Abstract

Bereavement is both an everyday, universal experience and a moment of profound individual disjuncture (Maddrell, 2009a, 2009b; Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010). As Liz Stanley has noted, ‘the “work” of mourning has a resounding impact on the lives of those who experience the death of someone loved’, which she describes as ‘… that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of boundaries which must occur when a loved one is lost’ (2002, p. 2).