What is the importance of the ocean in the novel, All Things Cease to Appear?

The ocean serves as a symbol of death, or the ability to abandon one's life. Several characters die in the ocean over the course of the novel. After Catherine is murdered, George wades into the ocean in a quasi-fugue state, as if to escape his reality. At the end of his life, when he knows there is incriminating evidence against him and he has nothing left, George again goes to the ocean, this time to die.