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In his study of Iris Murdoch's 1958 novel The Bell, Peter Edgerly Firchow considers the symbiotic merits of both Murdoch's philosophy and her tion: "it not necessary to delve first into Murdoch's philosophical work before one reads her fiction," Firchow observes. "A good argument can be made that it is better to start with the fiction even if one's ultimate aim is to understand the philosophy, since the fiction is, almost explicitly at times, presented as a testing ground for the philosophy-hers, or for that matter, anyone else's" (158). Firchow situates Murdoch in the European tradition of philosopher-novelists, which includes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who use the arena of fiction as a moral testing ground where characters are placed on a chessboard to experience how a system of idealized behavior would manifest itself in actuality:
Instead of enquiring abstractly about the nature of good and whether and under what circumstances it might be possible to be good-or to seek abstractly to examine the bases of what might make a good society, as say, Thomas More or even Plato do-Murdoch presents us with individuals who are trying to live good lives or trying to establish a society in which it may be possible to live a good life. (Firchow 159)
Born in 1919, a year after the end of World War I, Murdoch was among a generation of British writers who lived through the haunting trauma and intermittent violence of the twentieth century (World War II, the Cold War) and its uneasy periods of respite (the Depression of the 1930s, 1950s postwar austerity). In her essay "Against Dryness," Murdoch notes, "We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age in which the dogmas, images, and precepts of religion have lost much of their power. We have not recovered from two wars and the experience of Hitler. We are also the heirs of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Liberal Tradition. These are the ele- ments of our dilemma" (287). The novel, as an art form, allowed Murdoch to integrate her art and philosophical inquiries while also expanding her abilities to work within certain literary traditions. Throughout her career, Murdoch professed a great admiration for nineteenth-century novelists such as Charles Dickens and...