Abstract

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are.