The Quest for God in the Novels of John Banville, 1973-2005

John Banville's protagonists long for a sense of completion that neither their own psyches nor the world can satisfy. His novels, as works of art, enact a literary analogy of this tension by displaying elements of realism and postmodernism together. The themes in Banville's work can be seen to form a cultural and psychic bridge between mysticism and postmodernism, portraying human consciousness in a bind of forever being trapped in language.