In The Magus, A brilliant novel written by John Fowles, Nicholas Urfe struggles between living in a world of fiction and learning the difficult lessons of reality. He is taken on a Journey that will lead him to understand why it is best to live in a world with imperfections instead of always rejecting it. Throughout the book, Fowles continuously focuses on what is real and what is not. Maurice Conchis, who represents the Bourami Island and everything on it, and who is the organizer of a mind game that puts Nicholas to test, represents fiction or a kind of non-physical reality. On the other hand, Alison, the Australian girl that Nicholas realizes he loves, portrays truth and reality. These two characters are very important in Nicholas’ life but they are opposites of each other in the way they interact with Nicholas. Conchis plays a game with Nicholas in which everything goes as intended and Alison is a girl which has an irregular relationship with Nicholas that does not evolve the way he wishes.
First of all, when Nicholas arrives on the island of Bourami and meets Maurice Conchis, he has no idea that he is enrolling himself into a game that is done each year to a different English teacher. He totally believes everything about this man who appears to be a guru, a mysterious master of all philosophical questions. When Nicholas is in Phraxos, it is almost like he is in a dream; his meetings with Conchis leave him in a sort of pleasurable daze. He is never hurt by anything, he loves listening and getting lost in the stories he is told by Conchis. As Maurice chats with Urfe, he senses, “A strong feeling persisted, when I swung my feet off the ground and lay back, that something was trying to slip between me and reality” (p. 105). Here we perceive that Nicholas is beginning to fall in the god game and that his mind is slowly drifting away from reality. The article “An Allegory of Self-Realization” by Barry N. Olshen says at one point that “The journey from London to Phraxos and back to London, then, is at once a physical reality and a metaphor for a non-physical reality”. Here we understand that when Nicholas returns to Phraxos, which is greatly associated with Conchis, it is as if he was in a non-physical world, a paradise for the mind where he basically never encounters meaningful difficulties. Consequently we can conclude that Conchis represents fiction. Moreover, the Greek island, which is closely linked to Conchis, is so beautiful and strange at the same time that it almost seems unreal to Nicholas. “It took my breath away when I first saw it, floating under Venus like a majestic black whale in an amethyst evening sea, and it still takes my breath away when I shut my eyes now and remember it” at this point, Fowles wants the reader to grasp that Nicholas’ perception of Phraxos is almost like heaven, which is another factor that tells us that when he is on the Island, or with Conchis, he totally escapes from reality.
