The Construction Of Moral Life In Iris Murdoch's Three Novels

Iris Murdoch is one of the most influential contemporary British writers. Having produced a good many novels and philosophical works, she is renowned for her prolificacy and her deep concern about morality. Murdoch's works are never textbooks telling people what is the right thing to do. Rather, she rejects rigid social rules and argues that moral life is an all-encompassing way of life.Murdoch values the importance of the individual in daily moral life. In this respect, she is much different from her contemporary philosophers, and her works reflect her exploration of the self and inner life, her understanding of egoistic desire and that the moral quest is from illusion to reality, and her advocation of the practice of attention in enhancing people's selfless moral life.This thesis intends to discuss three of Murdoch's novels, using her viewpoint of moral life, in order to explore Murdoch's way of moral progress. Murdoch stress much the value of the individual in moral life, so relevant concepts such as self, egoism and attention are studied in the thesis, which has not been done in former researches on Murdoch. The thesis aims to analyze Murdoch's standpoints of self, egoism and attention respectively in The Bell, A Severed Head and The Unicorn. A thorough understanding of these three elements helps to demonstrate Murdoch's basic structure of accomplishing the moral quest. Human beings should first establish a full-fledged self, then transcend the limitations of egoism, and lastly make good use of the selfless attention on other things to have a rightly set moral life.