| This study examines twenty-four novels written over a period of thirty-five years by the British author, Iris Murdoch, and demonstrates how Murdoch's persistent belief in human virtue through the absolute value of love becomes the basis for the epiphanic structure of her otherwise largely realistic narratives. The revelatory moment in these works during which a character experiences visionary understanding of the reality of all that is "not-self" follows a clear pattern of events which moves the character through catastrophic loss to depersonalization of consciousness and finally to revelation through love of the separate integrity of "real things" and other people, a pattern evident to varying degrees in all of the novels. The dissertation also examines Murdoch's four philosophical texts in which she discusses and ultimately rejects both Romantic and existential stances concerning value even as she asserts her own eclectic philosophy of the absolute and its relationship to art and to human freedom. The views expressed in these philosophical studies and in Murdoch's two Platonic dialogues are the critical conceptual bases underlying her novels' epiphanic structure.;In addition, this dissertation includes a historical overview of epiphany from Hellenic and Judeo-Christian religious contexts to secular textual applications. The works of other twentieth-century writers are addressed to the degree that they serve to highlight the evolution and range of epiphany's uses in modern literature. Although the experience of epiphany in Murdoch's novels demonstrates the familiar quality of noesis, it is not a moment of self-discovery for the characters. It is, rather, a transcendent point of attention when the self recedes and love as the revelatory source is apprehended beyond suffering and consolation as the absolute referent for human virtue. The "showing forth" of Murdoch's modern fictional epiphanies is the passive-attentive moment of the characters' instantaneous awareness that "otherness" is ultimately real and that attention to it makes possible ex nihilo a kind of grace. |
