The Platonic Display Of The Contrast Between Fantasy And Reality In Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn

As an influential and productive post-war novelist and moral philosopher,Iris Murdoch throughout her whole life creates altogether twenty-six novels and five philosophical works.In addition to these frequently-referred novels and philosophical books,Murdoch also creates works like drama and poetry.For most literary critics,Murdoch’s writing is thought-provoking with its multiple themes and various perspectives,and the writer herself is particularly fond of taking the novels as the medium to illustrate the philosophical thought.As the seventh novel written by Murdoch,The Unicorn aims to reveal a moral dilemma of human condition through a mysterious,imaginative and Gothic love story.In the novel,Murdoch compares human beings to those prisoners in Plato’s Cave Allegory,who indulge in their own fantasy and take the shadows on the wall as the mere reality.The true reality,however,is represented by the sun beyond the cave.In this sense,Plato’s Allegory is the performance of the contrast between fantasy and reality.In view of this,the thesis will be based on the cave allegory,and analyze how Iris Murdoch in the novel The Unicorn displays the contrast between fantasy and reality in her own way.Three dimensions will be particularly explored,which are the novel’s construction of the environment,the crafting of the characters and the writer’s metafictional technique.In terms of the construction of the environment in the novel,it is through the display of the environment inside and outside Gaze,Riders’s environment and the sun’s image that the contrasting relationship between fantasy and reality is presented.As regards the crafting of the characters,three pairs of relationships are applied to further demonstrate the contrasting relationship.The metafictional technique for the performance of the contrast includes the initial frame construction through the design of the stories within stories and the succeeding frame-breaking by means of having characters reflecting on their own fictional life,parody,and cross-genre writing.The multidimensional design of the contrast between fantasy and reality is also the reflection of human beings’ arduous search for the ultimate reality.