The Image of Man in Metafictional Novels by John Banville: Celebrating the Power of the Imagination
The Image of Man in Metafictional Novels by John Banville: Celebrating the Power of the Imagination

Summary/Abstract: The essay analyzes how John Banville reconstructs the image of man in his two novels Kepler and Doctor Copernicus by means of broadly understood metafiction. The Author of the essay discusses the following elements: implied author’s and narrator’s power of creative imagination and Rheticus’s self-consciousness which enables to create fiction and intertextuality of the novel. When analyzing the last aspect of the novels, the Author mentions also Michel Foucault’s term, heterotopia. The results of this analysis are twofold. On the one hand, man has got practically unlimited creative imagination on their part. On the other hand, man seems to be lost in the world of unclear ontological boundaries, which proves a paradoxical image of man.

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