Abstract: John Banville's short story, “De Rerum Natura,” was first published in The Transatlantic Review in 1974 and its revised edition was published, once again, as the concluding piece in his collection of short stories, Long Lankin, in 1984. The story unfolds its plot around the father's instructions for his son and the son's acceptance of his father, and reiterates Epicurus's idea about the salvation of souls through its imitation of Lucretius's long poem, “De Rerum Natura.” What is worth noting is that the revised version employs the nonnarrated and disnarrated strategies to implicate the estranged father-son relationship. The tension generated between such an implication and the plot development creates a space for Banville to construct a covert narrative progression that hides beneath the plot and advances in parallel. Such a narrative progression connects many images and probabilities, all of which seemingly have nothing to do with the plot, such as comparing the son to a snail, satirizing the son's neglect of and indifference toward his father, and revealing the son's hidden excitement over the old man's death. With this dual narrative progression, Banville's story echoes, emotionally, both the enlightening long poem, “De Rerum Natura,” which takes rationality and optimism as its main key, and the old English ballad, “Long Lankin,” whose main key builds on restlessness and fear. Like a well-wrought urn, the story explores its superb structure and profound theme to represent Banville's inheritance and renovation of the literary traditions of European Modernism, and to touch the sensitive nerves of the “historical readers” by insinuating the reality of the Irish society in the 1970s and 1980s as well.

Key words: "De Rerum Natura", "Long Lankin", the nonnarrated, the disnarrated, dual narrative progression