“…When Miss Vavasour left me in what from now on was to be my room I threw my coat over a chair and sat down on the side of the bed and breathed deep the stale unlived-in air, and felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me. (Banville, 2005, p. 157) As Neil Murphy (2018) asserts, the house as a metaphor, which is indeed a significant concept of Irish literature in terms of the "Big House" reflecting the historiographic and social aspects of the Irish nation, is a present theme in various novels of Banville. However, in The Sea, it is present on a wider personal level, as a materialising metaphor for Max Morden's fragmented childhood and present realities.…”