The freeplay of signifiers: conflicts of good and evil

British critic Frank Kermode (2003:237) claims that the meaning of a novel can be categorized into two essential components: manifest senses and latent senses; the latent sense is the key to get the ultimate significance of the story consisting of the underlying secrets, but it is usually disregarded by the readers, who only comprehend the surface meaning. Murdoch, the novelist and the philosopher, unexceptionally fills her works with the sets of floods of barriers and riddles, deepens the theme, the senses of the story and makes it difficult for the readers to comprehend her works meticulously. She acknowledges that once works have entered the reader's domain of comprehension, then they stop belonging exclusively to the author. She agrees that people can have different interpretations, and there are some interpretations she would welcome; however, in the end it is not the author, but it is readers who are going to decide what the work means (Evans 1989:153). The questing reader rather than the writer becomes more of the focus in the recent years, paving the way for deconstruction of which attention to language and textuality, to reading strategies, subjectivity and the constitution of knowledge demonstrates the pervasiveness of play in discourse. This study seeks to display how the novels of Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels engage in the deconstructive reading.

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Deconstruction ,

Psychoanalysis ,

Murdoch. ,