Christopher Isherwood’s Psychological Makeup

Abstract

Perhaps the last thing we might expect to find in Isherwood’s novels is an expression of hunger for the comforts of a defined position in an ordered society, and yet at times it seems as if his work is imbued with that very sentiment. His main characters give the impression of standing outside society less in the postures of contemptuous rejection or heroic defiance than in those of woeful acceptance that some quirk of personality in themselves makes them isolate and outcast. Yet that impression quickly fades. The wistful desire to belong to an ordered and hierarchical society never becomes more than a vague dream. So troubled are they with the problems of their own inescapable individuality that at times any relief seems appealing. Close though he comes at times to endorsing society, Isherwood–s own temperament and trust in individual experience and self-discovery make him forgo the temptation to believe in the status quo. Instead, we find at the centre of his work, not Society, but a proliferation of dramatic metaphor. What might at first seem to be a question about the necessity of belonging to a group turns out to be a question of art.