The Empathic Paradox. Third‐Person Narration in John Banville’s First‐Person Narratives

Abstract

John Banville is a novelist strongly associated with the mode of first‐person narration. Where his novels do switch to a third‐person perspective – much of Ghosts, parts of Shroud, most of The Infinities– the narration itself becomes highly problematic, and is always revealed as an imaginative attempt by a first‐person narrator to move beyond his own narcissistic encounter with the world. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s theories about the relationship between narcissism and empathy are central to this essay’s examination of instances of third‐person narration, primarily in the novels Shroud and The Infinities. Ultimately, it argues for an understanding of these problematic attempts at third‐person narration as instrumental in the narrators’ efforts to transcend their narcissism and to advance towards a more empathic, less self‐centred position in relation to others.