How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Yes, it was time to move. I had felt, during recent months, sometimes boredom, sometimes despair, as I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art. The trouble was that the dark blaze, whose absence I had deplored in Arnold's work, was absent here as well. I could not fire and fuse these thoughts, these people, into a whole thing. (1.5.4)
Hmm. A novel in which a hero not unlike Bradley Pearson himself engages in a series of reflections about life and art? Sound familiar?
Quote #8
Daddy writes too much, don't you think? He hardly ever revises. He writes something, then he "gets rid of it" by publishing it, I've heard him actually say that, and then he writes something else. He's always in such a hurry, it's neurotic. I see no point in being an artist unless you try all the time to be perfect. (1.4.49)
When Julian Baffin makes these remarks to Bradley Pearson, he wonders if she's simply parroting the views of her ex-boyfriend, Oscar Belling. We don't know much about Oscar Belling's views on art, but we can certainly point to someone else that Julian is echoing—Bradley Pearson himself.
Quote #9
'Now if the greatest of all geniuses permits himself to be the hero of one of his plays, has this happened by accident?'
'No.'
'Is he unconscious of it?'
'No.'
'Correct. So this must be what the play is about.'
'Oh. What?'
'About Shakespeare's own identity. About his urge to externalize himself as the most romantic of all romantic heroes.' (1.23.141-47)
You can thank Iris Murdoch for giving us a passage that reveals the beating heart of The Black Prince. Bradley Pearson's views on Hamlet are the key to understanding his own narrative, and that handy correspondence makes it much easier for us to navigate the tricky waters of the book.