The Portrayal of Psychological Time in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction

This article examines the representation and functions of psychological time in Iris Murdoch’s fiction, with particular attention to “Under the Net”, “The Flight from the Enchanter”, “The Unicorn”, and “The Italian Girl”. The study argues that Murdoch treats time not simply as chronological sequence but as an ethically charged mode of consciousness. Her characters inhabit temporal structures produced by memory, dream, hallucination, anticipation, repetition, trauma, and confrontation with death. These structures disturb linear chronology and make the past coexist with the present, while imagined futures act retrospectively upon present decisions. Psychological time therefore becomes one of Murdoch’s principal devices for dramatizing the conflict between fantasy and reality. Retrospection may imprison a character in an egoistic narrative, but it may also expose the falsity of self-protective myths; dreams and hallucinations may distort perception, yet they can reveal repressed fear, guilt, homelessness, dependence, and mortality. The article gives special attention to Nina’s nightmare in “The Flight from the Enchanter”, Effingham Cooper’s visionary experience in “The Unicorn”, Hunter’s hallucinatory recognition in “The Flight from the Enchanter”, Jake Donaghue’s memory-bound perception in “Under the Net”, and the relation between death, awakening, and temporal reorientation across the novels. Murdoch’s psychological time is ultimately shown to be moral as well as formal: the movement from fantasy toward attention to reality requires a transformation in how characters inhabit the past, perceive the present, and imagine the future.