The Unselfing Pilgrimage: A Correlative Study Of Theme And Narrative Strategies Of The Black Prince

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is a British female writer with international reputation. She is a writer who introduces and explains philosophy in novel writing. In an age when the reality of ultimate goodness has been far outdated an idea, Iris Murdoch stalwartly resumes the ontological status of the Good as the responsibility of moral philosophy and novel writing. Opposing to the solipsistic tendency of the existential ideas, and influenced by the French woman-philosopher Simone Weil's thought of the "Unselfing", Iris Murdoch in her philosophy and her novels points out a road to the good. This pilgrimage is a process in which man gives up self-attention and learns to focus on others. Only when the self is emptied from the consciousness, the reality can be perceived by the individual. To give up the self-attention and form a state of Void that Good can enter in, a Platonic, Dantean and Freudian blended Eros is the medium and gateway. Literarily, against the practice of drawing fabled frameworks and building intellectual patterns, she asks for a return to the tradition of nineteenth century realism. Not mere tradition, however, is what she suggests, but a midway or marriage of the new and the old. This integration is what she has kept on seeking as well as a road she points for...