Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince: a valorization of metafiction as a virtuous aesthetic practice

Having a self-conscious narrator who is obsessed by the question of art-truth relationship, The Black Prince is the paradigm of metafiction among Iris Murdoch's works.A discourse about the problems of writing fiction, the novel actually exposes the ontological status of all literary fiction, i.e. its quasi-referentiality, its indeterminacy and its existence as a linguistic world.This paper argues that more than being a thematic concern, metafiction is the integral part of The Black Prince whose fragmented form mirrors the complexity of reality.It concludes that such a full-fledged metafictional project does not resonate with the anti-fictional convictions but aspires to validate metafiction as the perfect moral form of fiction.