The Picaresque Path To Good

Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is both an influential novelist and an outstanding moral philosopher. Her dual career as both a literary writer and a moral philosopher raises a general issue: What is the relationship between her novels and her philosophy? In my opinion her works provide a possible rapprochement between literature and philosophy. In this essay I will try to illustrate how this rapprochement is achieved in her first novel Under the Net.Under the Net is Iris Murdoch's first published novel. Critics have tried to interpret it with different means:'angry'social realism, existentialism, feminism, mysticism, theory of psychology, New-Platonism, etc. All these interpretations are quite enlightening to understand the novel properly. But it seems that we have lost the enjoyment of the art, of the story. Indeed some critics have pointed out that the novel partly resembles Pickwick Papers in its episodic account of the boozy journeys. But no further explanation is made. In my opinion, the use of the picaresque convention is vital to the success of the novel. It gives the philosophical concepts a concrete form. Therefore in this essay I will try to show how the philosophical concepts are veiled in the picaresque form.The thesis mainly contains four chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction to Iris Murdoch: her life, her dual career both as a philosopher and a literary writer, the critical reception of her works, and a brief introduction to Under the Net. The second chapter examines the definition and characteristics of picaresque novel, and its representation in Under the Net. In the third chapter I will deal with Murdoch's critique of both'convention'and'neurosis'as represented in the major characters of the novel. The fourth chapter mainly deals with how Jake's picaresque journey represents his path to Good—the central concept of Murdoch's moral philosophy. By all these analyses, I hope to illustrate why Under the Net is both exciting as literature and penetrating as philosophy.