The concept of the “Other” has been a salient idea throughout the history of modern Western thought. This concept and its significance in human relations are among the key themes of Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels (1966). Contrary to most previous studies, which primarily offer biographical or intentionalist moral readings of this novel, the present ethical study employed Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the Self-Other relation, along with the related notions of Face and Desire, to offer a novel reading of the relationship between two of the major characters of the novel, namely Carel Fisher and Patricia O’Driscoll. To achieve this, the present study adopted a qualitative method based on content analysis to shed light on Carel’s and Pattie’s Desires for the Other. The findings revealed that, despite his inability to Desire Pattie and his failure to meet his ethical responsibilities toward her, Carel embraces the alterity of the Other to a certain degree and values Pattie beyond his own needs, as he worries about her leaving, and when she finally does, he commits suicide, holding her farewell letter. Unlike Carel, Pattie embodies a Levinasian lover as she consistently responds to Carel’s Face and fulfills her ethical responsibilities toward him. Moreover, Pattie is the only character in the novel who never labels the others and never imposes a fixed identity on them. Thus, the findings of the present study carry significant implications for the ethical study of Murdoch’s fictional works and other post-war realist novels dealing with similar ethical problems by demonstrating that the dynamics of the Self and the Other are so intricate that singular characters like Carel cannot be reduced to stereotypical classifications or predefined identities as in the conventional moral readings of Murdoch’s novels.
