Quest Of Good: A Spatial Approach To Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea

The Sea, The Sea is the most influential novel of Iris Murdoch, which wins the Booker Prize in 1978. The book, telling a story of the narrator Charles who undergoes a series of events during his retirement and finally walks out of his fantasy world to see reality, illustrates the fundamental moral problem set forth in Murdoch's theory of ethics-the tendency of the ego to erase the reality of others. This thesis attempts to analyze the moral significance of the novel by applying a spatial approach to the examination of the narrator's quest for Good.The thesis is divided into five chapters with the introduction and the conclusion as the first and the last chapter. The introduction puts forward the argument of this thesis after surveying the Western and Chinese studies on Iris Murdoch's literary creation and the novel The Sea, The Sea in particular. Chapter two reveals Charles's predicaments in the era of modernity through an analysis of the structuring the fictional space at topographic level and the underlying cause for Charles's obsessioa Chapter three, through an analysis of the space at chronotopic level, examines the driving powers behind the changing of space-time and the different phases on the way to moral goodness which Murdoch's ethical theory concerns. Chapter four analyses the structuring of the signified space and decodes the meanings of the spatial images with the extra-textual references, and then further explains the philosophical thinking contained in this novel-achieve the moral goodness through "attention" and "void."Finally comes the conclusion:the spatial approach is effective way to interpret The Sea, The Sea, which not only makes the reading of the novel more systematic, but also enable the philosophical thinking implicated in the novel gain its shape more clearly, that is, to achieve the moral goodness is to empty the egotism out of consciousness and be attentive to the reality of others.