Images and Reflections of the Spiritual Self in Christopher Isherwood’s Narratives

Throughout his life, Christopher Isherwood explored his sense of himself through a range of different genres of writing: autobiography, letters and journals, and fiction. The polysemic image of the mirror plays a major role in the structuring of his novels and other writings. Through the figure of the mirror, the writer signals many nearly imperceptible yet significant changes over time. This article explores this image in a range of Isherwood’s writings, and argues that, through its deployment, the artist very often questions himself about the dichotomy between appearance and reality. The presence of the mirror in the early writings assumes modalities which are distinct from those belonging to the conversion period to Vedanta, the Hindu-oriented philosophy and religion.