TRAVEL – QUEST – TRAVELOGUE: THE PURSUIT OF SELF IN IRIS MURDOCH’S NOVELS

Abstract

The article examines the motif of travel in Iris Murdoch’s novels as a central aesthetic and ethical principle rather than a subsidiary narrative device. Despite extensive scholarship on Murdoch’s prose, spatial movement in her fiction has remained insufficiently theorized. The study addresses this gap by conceptualizing the «travelogue» as a category that integrates geographical displacement with psychological, moral, and existential transformation. The aim of the article is to identify the main models of travel in Murdoch’s fiction and to demonstrate how they structure experience and moral perception. Drawing on close textual analysis, intertextual reading, and genre-historical contextualization, the paper traces the evolution of travel from the modernist travelogue of Under the Net to the symbolic quest of later novels, including The Good Apprentice and The Green Knight. Particular attention is paid to the model of the journey «from England to England», which reworks the medieval quest in a modern psychological key.The analysis shows that Murdoch consistently transforms external routes into inner trajectories of ethical formation. Spatial shifts correlate with changes in consciousness, while foreign and domestic loci function as projections of inner states. Travel in Murdoch rarely culminates in resolution; instead, it produces moments of moral insight grounded in attention to the Other and acceptance of ordinary reality. The paper also demonstrates how Murdoch combines documentary precision with lyrical defamiliarization, creating a «double optics» in which space operates simultaneously as physical environment and affective experience.The findings suggest that Murdoch’s prose constitutes a system of open routes in which travel becomes a philosophical instrument and a model of moral practice. Her novels articulate a vision of human existence as journey without final destination, thereby extending the tradition of the late modernist novel of moral formation and redefining travel as a universal metaphor of ethical becoming.