![]() ![]() This dissertation reveals and explores Murdoch’s hidden elegy for Thompson in The Sea, The Sea, and its contextualisation within her wider body of work. I argue that his death made a lasting impact on Murdoch, and his elegisation in The Sea, The Sea constituted a watershed in her fiction. Thompson served with British Special Forces in the Second World War, and was captured by Bulgarian fascists and shot by firing squad. In this way Murdoch’s elegy for Thompson is a significant link in the evolution of the elegiac form, from a readable verse memorial into an implied, invisible, wordless lament. It argues that she memorialised him in her prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea (1978), in a complex web of references, symbols and clues, both hidden and overt, which create a metatextual memorial, or form of elegy, for Thompson within the text. Abstract This dissertation identifies a hitherto unnoticed significance in Iris Murdoch’s fiction of the close relationship between Murdoch and one of the most important men in her life, her Oxford friend, Frank Thompson. ![]()
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