The Irish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, John Banville (1945- ) is considered as the lightest Irish writer of his generation and one of the well-known writers who writes in English with an extraordinary imagination. His philosophical novels deal with issues such as the nature of perception, the incompatibility of fantasy and reality, and the individual isolation of existence. His works fall into both categories of postmodernism and magic realism. In most of his novels, the main characters are in search of a "home" that they think belongs to them, but each time their search fails because there has never been such a ‘home’. ‘Home’ in these novels is a symbol of identity, and the characters in these works are in fact looking for an identity that they think has been predetermined for them. His The Sea for instance, recounts the story of a man who returns to the place where he was born in order to alleviate the pain of his wife’s death. In addition, The Blue Guitar tells the story of a ‘painster’ i.e. a painter who has left painting and spent his entire life stealing. His last thievery is his friend's wife. Like the protagonist of The Sea, Oliver tries to find the reasons for his baffling situation. The present study aims to examine these two novels through the French critic Jean-Luc Nancy’s concepts of ‘identity’, ‘community’, and ‘Being Singular Plural’. It represents Banville’s approval of Nancy’s theory that although ‘singularity’ always fails in favour of ‘plurality’ and “being-with’ is typical to human essence, there is no pre- determined identity upon which one must base his or her character.
