The state of the writer in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http: //www.uni-jena.de/, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (BP), which was published in 1973, is considered her most successful and brilliant novel by her readers as well as by her critics. Richard Todd describes it as her closest approach to the ‘post-modernist’ novel , which is especially in the context of narrative unreliability highly interesting and complex. However, the central theme of this paper concerns the relation between the two writers Bradley Pearson and Arnold Baffin. It will be discussed which function is ascribed to this comparison of the two characters in The Black Prince and to what extent the frequently quoted artist-saint contrast of Murdoch’s works is applicable to this constellation. Therefore, the first chapter is concerned with Bradley Pearson’s account of himself and Arnold Baffin as writers, and to a certain extent with the question of Bradley’s narrative reliability as well as - and this is essential - with Arnold’s and Bradley’s different definitions of the art of writing. The relation between Arnold and Bradley, which is already a topic of the following chapter, will be particularly examined in the last chapter where the focus will be on the discussion about the (hypothetical) artist-saint contrast within The Black Prince. […]