Exploration Of The "Self" In Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince

The Black Prince, one of Iris Murdoch’s masterpieces, incorporates fictions and philosophical thoughts in literary texts, in which Murdoch transcends the framework and shows us in the most explicit way her concepts of "love""goodness" and "art". It mirrors people’s real living conditions, full of criticism to self-centeredness and desires for self-realization. The plot of the novel proceeds forward in two intertwined narrative lines. The main line is the love affair between Bradley and Julian. The subordinate line goes around the complex relationships between Bradley and three other women, namely Priscilla, Christian and Rachel. The two narrative lines parallel or intertwine with each other throughout the whole novel. Thus, different self models are presented, posing the problem of how the self is recognized and realized in the existential dilemma.Basing its argument on the text and Sartre’s concept of the "Other" and "self", this thesis probes into the relationships among characters and their different choices in The Black Prince and Murdoch’s views of morality and aesthetics on character building. Three parts are to be expounded. By analyzing the relationship with the "Other", the different courses of life of female characters are the focus of the first part, mirroring the the diverse self inhabited in female characters. The second part concentrates on the extreme self of Bradley which resulted in his self crisis, illustrating from the perspectives of the influence of his childhood, egoism and sado-masochism. The final part emphasizes the organic unity of "love""art" and "goodness" drawn from Murdoch’s morality and aesthetics, in which it is the goodness that eventually led Bradley find his true self and self-salvation.From the arguments above, this thesis is intended to analyze the "self" of characters in The Black Prince, to get a whole view of Murdoch’s concept of the moral value of the "self", and to attract people’s concern over the philosophical significance of the dilemma of human existence revealed in the novel.