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The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell has received great notice from critics both as a distinguished work of art in its own right and as an indication of a new development in contemporary literature. Particular interest has been shown in Durrell's techniques of characterization and in his handling of point of view in these novels. My object has been to analyze Durrell1s concept of the psyche and to show how it gives rise to his techniques of characterization and to his handling of point of view. In analyzing Durrell's concept of the psyche, I have tried to show how this concept has been influenced by the writings of the German psychologist and doctor, Georg Groddeck, and by the concept of relativity which has had so profound an influence not only on the physical sciences but on many other areas of human thought. Durrell believes that this concept of relativity must necessarily alter our view of the nature of the human psyche and that as a result the traditional view of the psyche as a separate and stable entity existing distinct from the rest of the world and subject in the main to the dictates of a conscious personal will must be superceded. The view of the human psyche presented in The Alexandria Quartet is strikingly like that of Groddeck, and throughout the novels Durrell stresses the supreme importance of the powers of the imagination, powers which Groddeck identified with the It and which both he and Durrell consider as alien to the ego and inhibited by man's ratiocinative faculty. But the idea of free will has traditionally been linked with the ego; will has been thought of as a conscious function. To anyone who retains this view of the will, Durrell's characters inevitably appear as willless people whose lives are in every instance directed by forces beyond their control. My initial study of Durrell's imagery (see Chapter II) substantiates this claim. However, a further analysis of Durrell's imagery leads one to modify this view of the characters. It becomes apparent that Durrell conceives of will not as a conscious function in man but as a function of the imaginative powers that belong to man's unconscious being. Freedom then becomes a matter of the subjection of the ego to the imaginative life, and what looks initially like a deterministic account of human life is actually an account of how the human being may, and in some cases does, achieve true freedom by a full submission of conscious self to the powers of the imagination. Such submission is most clearly shown in the lives of those characters who strive for artisthood and most notably in the life of Darley. The role of the City is important in the characterization, because in various ways it represents the powers of the imagination. Durrell depicts the nature of the human psyche by showing the necessary and inevitable conflict between ego and imagination and by showing how this conflict can and should lead to an increase in imaginative power. In doing this Durrell presents three distinct but related views of his characters: the view of man-within-Larger Man, the view of the City as identical with Groddeck's It and of the characters as egos, and the view of the City as the only character in the Quartet. This last view of the characters may prove to be Durrell's most notable technical achievement in these novels, for here, with his technique of elaborate "prism-sightedness," he presents the human psyche in unusual depth and detail. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Self-knowledge serves as the basis for further insight into other themes and ideas. The investigation proceeds, then, from the search for self to the somewhat higher plane of the role of the artist in society; it is completed with an analysis of the motivations which lead the artist into an attainment of complete artistic fulfillment.

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This thesis examines the idea of modern love as expressed in the four novels of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

Any study of The Alexandria Quartet would be incomplete without a discussion of Durrell's concept of time. His spacetime relativity proposition is central to the work and, therefore, must be fully understood if The Alexandria quartet is to be appreciated. This investigation proposes to examine Durrell's relativity proposition as it is presented in The Alexandria Quartet. The study will begin with a general discussion of time from both a scientific and philosophical point of view. This introduction will focus on the modern cyclic view of time, or mind-time, as opposed to the more traditional linear concept of time. After the introductory presentation, the study will deal with the view of time as presented by Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet and will concentrate on time and setting, on time and modern love, on time and reality as seen from the varying points of view of the many characters, and finally on time and the artist.

The central project of this dissertation concerns itself with the port city, a recurrent setting of the modernist novel. It also seeks to investigate what lies behind the fact that the setting of the port city often coexists with the telling of stories about a malleable or exchangeable self or personal identity. Beginning with an understanding of modernity as a destructive whirlwind, I proceed to trace the various literary modernists who have used the port city as a space that might let one gain some shelter--or even benefit--from that storm. This dissertation begins with the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer before moving through Pound's translation of that poem and Melville's Moby-Dicky. It looks also at Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet as key examples of the modernist port city novel. These texts occupy a broad swath of chronology and their settings cover a wide area geography. When combined with the diverse national backgrounds of these authors, this range of time, place, and cultures intends to demonstrate both the pervasive nature of the crisis modernity provokes in our sense of identity and the persistent appeal of the port city as a space in which to grapple with this crisis.

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In this dissertation I argue that in the characters in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet there is consistently evidenced a psychological orientation towards growth. An introductory Chapter One surveys and a concluding Chapter Six summarizes the dissertation, but the body of the text is four chapters demonstrating the growth-orientation in four characters.

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