A Narratological Reading Of The Black Prince

Iris Murdoch (1919--1999) is recognized as one of the most productive and influential novelists in English literature after the Second World War. She has written twenty-six novels, two poetry collections and a number of plays in 40 years, which constitute one of the most impressive bodies of fiction produced in English in the twentieth century. Iris Murdoch was awarded many prizes--the James Tait Black Memorial prize for The Black Prince in 1973, the Whitbread prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine in 1974, and the Booker prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978.The thesis analyzes one of her masterpieces--The Black Prince from the perspective of narratology. The thesis consists of an introduction part, three main chapters and a conclusion part. Chapter one analyzes the narrative structure of the book. There are two narrative structures. One is the framing narrative structure, which is of story level. The other one is the embedded narrative structure, which is of critic level. Chapter two analyzes narrative voice in the book and it is the most important part of the thesis. I will analyze how three women make their different choices when they have an unhappy marriage life by using the communal narrative voice theory. Chapter three analyzes the narrator's gender consciousness in the book. Murdoch'general art thoughts and skills are analyzed first, and then their applications to the male narrator in the book are analyzed.