ABSTRACT
In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode argued that her polemical essays locate the problem of contemporary fiction in narcissism and existentialism, but that she herself up to that point had failed to write a novel equal to the eloquence she urged on all novelists in her essays, especially “Against Dryness.” There have always been readers who hate Iris Murdoch’s novels. Murdoch’s fiction is passionately dedicated to utterance–that is, to a committed presentation and advocacy of a “world” that echoes her best and most committed thinking about human fictionalizing and its ontological function. Murdoch’s impulse is dialogic, and like Mikhail Bakhtin’s Feodor Dostoevsky she feels a religious urge to reflect generously on her characters. Murdoch’s allegiance to the Russian tradition, as pointed out by Peter Conradi in his excellent book, Iris Murdoch: The Artist and the Saint, has led her to subtle shifts in narrative form, and a high degree of self-reflexivity is evident in most of the novels.
