The first sentence of the passage is written in the first person. We are told that a story will be told to us, so we expect the content of the passage to be in the first person throughout, yet this is not the case. The narration quickly switches to the third person with, ‘falling, what the child fears, of its frailty and morality.’ However, it once again changes to the third person in the second paragraph with, ‘my back and face felt the dreadful imprint of the hand…’Almost a case of the first person versus the third person, it moves from being subjective, in talking of a child and a man fall, to objective, in talking of his own experience of falling. In such a sense, this proves fairly philosophical.
The actual body of the text is very densely written, with only two paragraphs and tightly phrased, long sentences (one sentence even being thirty-one words long. The longevity of the sentences perhaps signifies the length of time in which he falls, as if the period of falling is slowly drawn out. Just as one says that before one dies, ‘Life flashes before one’s eyes,’ the subject feels as though the time between which he is pushed and when he touches water is almost infinite, ‘How long, how infinitely expansible.’ The subject also evidently felt the fear of death, ‘a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death.’
The inclusion of a quote in the eighth line of the passage, ‘There is nothing more I can do,’ comes quite suddenly. It gently and subtly breaks up the intensity of the text, while turning into more of a philosophical and theoretical piece of writing.
Murdoch uses imagery to depict a false sense of presence for the reader, such as ‘the enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail, breakable, crushable animal form…’The human body is viewed as an easily damageable animal. Her descriptions of very specific parts of her body tells us how fear and pain has taken over her body, for example, ‘My back and waist felt the dreadful imprint...’, ‘My hands reached out in vain…’, ‘My feet jerked in a weak, useless spasm…’ However, not only does Murdoch use imagery, but she also uses a repetitive writing style to convey feelings and the senses. An example is in the first paragraph, where she writes ‘how long it was, how terrible, how hopeless.’ In dong so, she draws the reader closer to what the narrator is actually feeling.
The first paragraph ends with, ‘Hard mineral gravitational scene.’ The second paragraph also ends with rock imagery, ‘Then my head struck violently against a smooth rock…’ The first paragraph is describing what he (the narrator) can see, and the second instance tells how the scene has turned into something which causes him harm.
When he (narrator) first falls into the water, the shock of it instinctively makes his body want to right itself, yet his body over his mind made him ‘aware that no swimming could take place in that vortex.’ Murdoch makes out to the reader that the shock of hitting the water has made her feel almost as if she’s in another world, ‘a dome of dark faintly translucent green, the waves above me.’
According to the narrator, his body is now ‘flailing senselessly in a maelstrom of powers which seemed to dismember me.’ The use in this context of ‘maelstrom’ is a metaphor, as not only is his body a tangled mess, as is his power to control it, but so too is the literal sense of his mind being ‘tangled’ and confused.
The suddenness of the final sentence demonstrates the unexpectedness of the head hitting the rock, and ‘struck violently against the smooth rock’ is almost oxy-moronic with the violence of a smooth rock, and a rock seen as a jutting, sharp form against the word smooth.
The description Iris Murdoch depicts of falling is powerful and effective as it takes the reader into the depths of both the fallers mind and the physical concept of the fear of falling. She has drawn the reader into the realms of someone else’s thoughts and feelings.
