Perception and its concomitants: the question of interpersonality in selected novels of Iris Murdoch

Perception is a fundamental medium for human beings to engage with the world around them. At any given moment, man is doomed to be exposed to an insufferable amount of sensory data, a big part of which, remains out of his selective perception. Encounters with the others in the world, where one is equipped with mental faculties, could be less problematic if the concomitants of perception also did not put veils upon what there is. Hence, the block of epistemic uncertainty arising from the compulsory existence of the viewpoints generates a gap between the reality and its perceptions. When the percept in question is of persons and things pertaining to them, this gap becomes even wider. This thesis, aims to explore the dynamics of interpersonal relationships in selected novels of Iris Murdoch, using R. D. Laing's social phenomenology as explained in his collaborative theory of 'interpersonal perception'. It argues that a majority of interpersonal problems stem from a mismanagement of concomitants that steer one's perceptual process and subsequently, one's behaviour. It reiterates the significance of Laing's 'direct' and 'meta' perspectives in apprehending the interpersonal nexus by proposing the additional necessity of harmonious operation of concomitants.