ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that death and art are explicitly and implicitly connected in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and The Sea, two seminal novels that act as major defining moments in Banville’s development. Banville’s deployment of the ekphrastic mode in several key novels is one of the ways in which his narrative structures extend beyond the sequential form of prose fiction. Banville’s work is intimately connected to the primary aesthetic rationale, while it also saturates and disturbs the primary narrated level to such a degree that it may even be seen as a replacement narrative. In The Book of Evidence, the narrative account seeks to interweave both the visual and the verbal, and the stillness of art with the inherent movement of verbal narrative. Banville’s dead and dying characters in The Sea are repeatedly represented in the context of varying visual images.
