Parody On The "black Prince" And "novel" Techniques

The Black Prince --The Celebration of Love is one of the most important works of Iris Murdoch in the 1970s, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize .The richness of its plots and narrative structure provides multiple possibilities of interpretation to the readers. On one hand, The Black Prince has a complete story, focusing on describing the characters and environmental background that manifests the realism style. And on the other hand, the author daringly adopts new techniques such as metafiction , irony, intertextuality and parody to show the complicated changeable and contingency of life. This thesis tries to use the basic theory of postmodernism to analyze the usage of parody and meta-fiction in The Black Prince, and how these techniques reveal the novel's theme.The first chapter analyzes the important feature of postmodernist in this novel: parody. Murdoch parodies Shakespeare's classic opera Hamlet in themes, forms and the character, constitute contact irony characteristics. In addition, Murdoch parodies the Greek mythology, Freud's "Oedipus plot", the traditional love novels, detective fiction, which overturns the traditional concepts.The second chapter analyzes the usage and significance of metafiction in The Black Prince. Murdoch adopts the invasive strategy, gives up the absolute narrative rights, and manipulates the multiple narrative perspectives and the coincidence to highlight the uncertainty, expose the unreliability of narrative and reflect diversity and multi-meanings of reality.Through analysis, we can see that how bold Iris Murdoch is in innovational writing in this novel. She creatively uses the postmodernism techniques to show the accidental and uncertainty of life, which reveals her profound thinking on art and moral.