The Idea of Parody and Comedy in Iris Murdoch’s Novel “The Nice and The Good”

Abstract

are full of different actual topics like art, love, freedom. There is a big influence of famous writers on Iris Murdoch’s novels, like William Shakespeare. This is a well-known fact, that Murdoch idealized Shakespeare so her novels are full of different interpretations from Shakespearean plays. In Iris Murdoch’s novels, for example, “The Black Prince”, “The Sea, The Sea”, “The Nice and The good”, even for the beginner reader, it is very easy to realize and understand the similarities with the Shakespearean plays. One of the researchers of Iris Murdoch’s fiction, Peter Conrad remem-bers, that in 1965 Murdoch started studied Shakespeare’s works of fiction, hoping that re-reading of Shakespearean plays would help her to create a relevant novel, this attempt of hers really had a result in her writing
and in 1968, she published her 11th novel, “The Nice and The good”, in which the influence of Shakespearean plays “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and “As You Like It”, is great. Everyone knows that Love is the main topic in Murdoch’s novels, so the use of a parody of Shakespearean comedies is not surprising for anyone.The main interest of Murdoch is comedy and she uses comic elements, motifs, symbols; the reason why the writer creates the impression of comic, is that she considers life extremely comic one, even in her the most serious novel (~The Black Prince”), which is saturated with tragic events, the writer makes an attempt to make the
reader laugh at the person who without any results is trying to prove his truth and is laughed at by other characters of the novel.The research in the article is based on the 20th century’s most influential literary critic and literary theorist Northrop Frye’s book Anatomy of Criticism, where he studies four essays. In one of his essays about myths he talks about
four types of character “alazon”, “eiron”, “bomolochos” and “agroikos”. In this article, the theories of comedy and its characteristics are discussed on the deep level together with the concept of parody and its genres; the Shakespearean influence and parody on this novel. In the end, the final results of this study are shown.