Iris Murdoch How to deal with internal conflicts
... Through reading works that convey ways and ideas to overcome internal conflicts, a person (a young student, especially), can grow and learn methods to deal with their own internal conflicts. Iris Murdoch, a British author, is an amazing writer who also conveys this idea of handling internal conflict; she is a prime example of how authors can influence their readers. Murdoch, a suspense writer, conveys inner conflicts in her main characters and puts them through traumatic events. By solving their problems and using different methods, Murdoch’s characters can teach many life lessons to people who study British literature. By studying the works of Iris Murdoch, in particular, The Good Apprentice, a student of British literature learns how to recover from an internal conflict. As the poem by Yamaoka Tesshu implies, an event triggered the enlightenment of the main character, in his language; the character in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Good Apprentice does the same. ... The final eternally unpardonable moral failure, the ultimate dereliction of duty” (Murdoch 12). Edward believed that Mark was his brother and by killing his brother, Edward began to struggle with a large internal conflict. ... Edward’s plight is not uncommon in Murdoch’s novels because her own life has been affected by the battles of an internal conflict. Almost all of Murdoch’s novels pit good and evil versus each other one way or another. Murdoch chose to have this battle go on in Edward’s head, not in the outside world because she was dealing with same issue: “Although good and evil were real enough, their presence in the world was not so easily defined” (Conradi 1). ... Through the character of Edward and Murdoch’s world a student can very easily learn and connect with this novel. Everyday, globally, students and teenagers deal with horrible instances of trauma that also set off a world of internal conflicts in their minds. ... In his poem, he realizes that it takes years for a person to overcome extreme amounts of pain that result from an internal conflict. ... Thus did day bring back his night” (Murdoch 11). ... All of these feelings last a long time, because it is Edward’s personal sentence to deal with his guilt.