The Good, Death, and Unselfing in Iris Murdoch
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This paper aims to show that Iris Murdoch describes the idea of the Good through the characters’ transformation of the vision from illusion to reality in her two novels, The Sea, the sea, and Bruno’s Dream. She, as a moral philosopher and English novelist, often tries to articulate the idea of the Good which has its origin in Plato’s idea of the Form. Her understanding of human nature is pessimistic in that she regards sin as universal from the perspective of the traditional Christian teachings and accepts Freud’s account of human nature. Thus, for Murdoch, human beings are selfish and egocentric. One of Murdoch’s major concerns is how to overcome the self-centeredness that prevents us from recognizing reality and loving others, and the Good is essentially linked with unselfishness because we may break illusion and become unselfish by contemplating the Good. Likewise, the two novels describe how the characters tend to fail to recognize reality and be under illusions caused by the dynamic of jealousy in the former and the denial of death in the latter. While the illusions are created by different reasons in the two novels respectively, they are crucially associated with egoism. Particularly, the experience of death plays a crucial role in the transformation in these two stories, and the death is metaphorical as well physical. Yet, the idea of death refers basically to the experience of death in daily life.
Abstract
This paper aims to show that Iris Murdoch describes the idea of the Good through the characters’ transformation of the vision from illusion to reality in her two novels, The Sea, the sea, and Bruno’s Dream. She, as a moral philosopher and English novelist, often tries to articulate the idea of the Good which has its origin in Plato’s idea of the Form. Her understanding of human nature is pessimistic in that she regards sin as universal from the perspective of the traditional Christian teachings and accepts Freud’s account of human nature. Thus, for Murdoch, human beings are selfish and egocentric. One of Murdoch’s major concerns is how to overcome the self-centeredness that prevents us from recognizing reality and loving others, and the Good is essentially linked with unselfishness because we may break illusion and become unselfish by contemplating the Good. Likewise, the two novels describe how the characters tend to fail to recognize reality and be under illusions caused by the dynamic of jealousy in the former and the denial of death in the latter. While the illusions are created by different reasons in the two novels respectively, they are crucially associated with egoism. Particularly, the experience of death plays a crucial role in the transformation in these two stories, and the death is metaphorical as well physical. Yet, the idea of death refers basically to the experience of death in daily life.
참고문헌 (19)
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