Hannah, The False God in Iris Murdoch’s Religious Garden

Abstract

Alice Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn was written in 1963, and it is a book advocating “goodness” with the purpose of guiding people out of the dilemma of anxiety and alienation. Experiencing anxiety and falling into alienation is one’s helpless compromise to the predicament of survival, but this is not the pessimistic philosophy, but the exploration of the truth of the world and life through the path to goodness. By analyzing Hannah, the main character of The Unicorn who is a messenger of the “Good” or just a false “God”, this article explores Murdoch’s viewpoints of the “Good” and the “God” on the forming and developing progression of her religious points of view.