The Manipulation of the Reader's Empathy in Iris Murdoch's First-Person Narrative

Öz

As a very prolific Irish author and philosopher, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) published her fifteenth novel, The Black Prince, which was first announced in 1973, to pay homage not only to Plato, but also to Shakespeare and Freud. What is peculiar to this novel is the fact that it is especially discussed throughout the novel that the Freudian sexual imagery of Murdoch’s protagonist is a clear reference to both Shakespeare and his fictional creation, Hamlet. It is obvious that in a fictional work character identification requires empathy, and “There is no question ... that readers feel empathy with (and sympathy for) fictional characters and other aspects of fictional worlds” (Keen, 2007; vii). However, besides the above qualities of the novel, The Black Price pictures a protagonist who is very likely to manipulate the reader’s empathy with him. As Murdoch unconventionally structured the novel to have forewords and postscripts by all of her main characters, her protagonist, who is supposed to be the only speaker and thus the only source of information for the reader (The Black Prince is an example of first-person narration where the narrator is one of the characters in the story, usually the protagonist of the text), loses his privilege and becomes one of the speakers among other characters who have their own narratives – the forewords and the postscripts since the fictional editor of the novel publishes texts written by all of the main characters of the novel, including the protagonist. Because of this, the protagonist throughout the novel frequently announces that he tells the reader nothing but the truth. He does not want to lose the reader’s interest on him as the protagonist of the novel that the reader is reading. However, the main points of his narration seem to contradict especially with the points that Murdoch’s other main characters establish in their own narratives. Hence, The Black Prince depicts a protagonist whose account of the events fails to be reliable for the reader. It becomes quite possible in the novel that the protagonist tells the reader not the truth, but his own version of the truth.