The Undertow of Parting: Mourning, Memory and Alienation in Manchester by the Sea

Milan Mathew

Independent Researcher.

Abstract

Manchester by the Sea (2016) by Kenneth Lonergan, presents grief not as a transient emotional response but as a permanent psychological condition that serves the self from its past, its relationships, andits sense of belonging. This paper examines how parting in its many forms functions as a foundational experience of grief in the human psyche, arguing that every significant separation constitutes a kind of mourning. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s theorization of mourning and melancholia, Julia Kristeva’sConceptualization of melancholia as a collapse of self-hood and failure of language in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) and Judith Butler’s Conception of Ungrievable Loss, this paper reads Lee Chandleras a figure of permanent psychological exile. In his psyche grief, nostalgia and alienation do not operate asseparate, distinguishable wave of feeling, where a street, a face, or the sound of the ocean collapses past and present into one unbearable moment. Through cinematic and narrative analysis, Manchester by the Seacaptures a universal psychological truth that human existence is punctuated by parting, and that grief is notan exception to life but it’s quiet, persistent undertow.

Keywords: Grief, Nostalgia, Alienation, Melancholia, Parting.