Charles opens his memoir by announcing that his retirement is an attempt to “be good,” and almost everything he writes in the next 80 pages of this chapter quietly contradicts that announcement. The first paragraph describes the sea in language so studied that he interrupts himself to warn against “fine writing”; he then keeps writing it. He frames his arrival at Shruff End as a turn toward goodness: “Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good” (2). The vocabulary here is theatrical, reflecting his background, rather than a true commitment to change.

The phrase “abjure magic” also refers to Prospero’s line in Act V of The Tempest, in which he commits to leaving magic behind and rejoining humanity, using language lifted directly from Prospero’s farewell. The borrowing is significant because Charles is a Shakespearean theatre director by trade; the novel positions him explicitly as a Prospero figure who has retired to an island, surrendered his books, and waits for the world to leave him alone.

Charles again leans on his theater career to describe his hopes for a life he has barely begun. The pages that follow are full of staged rituals: The four-minute meals served on proper napkins, the daily swim, the pebbles arranged in a border around the lawn, the rope tied to the iron banister. The Futility of Renouncing One’s Nature runs through this whole opening: Every gesture of withdrawal from society and his past is also a performance, addressed to a reader Charles has already begun to imagine when he reflects on “if these words are printed in the not too distant future” (3). The first-person narration offers insight into Charles’s thoughts, revealing that he has not truly left the theatre. He has rebuilt a smaller one in which he is the only actor, and the possible audience exists only in the future.

The diary’s most telling structural feature is what Charles cannot bring himself to describe. He writes the opening paragraph about the sea, then breaks off: “something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it” (1). He then withholds the revelation of his sea-monster vision for nearly 20 pages, filling the gap with the banal aspects of his new life: cookery, swimming, and real estate. When he finally returns to it, he assembles a careful list of rational explanations and settles on the LSD flashback. Murdoch arranges this to reveal what Charles himself doesn’t notice: The monster is interleaved with the gradual surfacing of Hartley’s name. The same chapter that produces “a great ‘mouth’ opening to the daylight, or […] a hole through which fires emerge from the centre of the earth” also gives us his admission that Hartley is “alpha and omega” (75). The Nostalgic Power of First Love organizes the whole architecture of the “Prehistory” chapter: Charles claims he came here to write about Clement, but Clement keeps being deferred while Hartley, as yet unnamed, moves to the narrative’s fore through glimpses of an old woman in the village and the catalogue of women who were “shadows” by comparison.

The Hartley pages themselves give the clearest evidence that what Charles calls love is in reality a one-sided relationship. He recounts the canal-side breakup by remembering her words: “You wouldn’t stay with me, you’d go away, you wouldn’t be faithful” (80). She told him plainly that she did not trust him to be constant, and he records her saying so. Yet within a few sentences, he has reframed her refusal as something she did to him: “She made me faithless. But with her I would have been faithful” (82), reframing her as culpable for his potential to be unfaithful. Her judgment of his character is, in his telling, the cause of his character developing as it has, as revealed by his reflections on his other love affairs. He insists “she was only right because she left me” (82), which preserves his view of their “romance” by converting her foresight into a self-fulfilling prophecy, essentially blaming her for all his relationships that came after. The nostalgic power of first love shows here as Charles’s private mythology, and his insistence on maintaining that perspective causes him to shape every memory of their interactions to support it. Even her clear-sighted refusal becomes proof of their bond she refused.

In this first chapter, Murdoch also lays down the groundwork for the novel’s exploration of jealousy through Charles’s casual asides. He calls it “the most involuntary of all strong emotions […] a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world” (82). This image reframes jealousy as being more than just emotion: It is a way of seeing, or rather, as Charles points out, of failing to see. He describes how “the demon of jealousy itself had warned me not to find out any details” (83), revealing that he is reluctant to know the truth, preferring to nurse a private picture of Hartley’s life as dull and remorseful. He invents her inner life to assuage his long-standing sense of injustice. Charles himself identifies Jealousy as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and its complexity is reflected by the fact that he can describe it with precision and yet still remain entirely subject to it. He assures himself that Hartley must, somewhere, be gnawed by “a bitter worm” identical to his own.

Murdoch establishes Charles’s narratorial authority in these opening pages as he asserts his own opinions as objective assessments. Charles’s contempt for Gilbert Opian, his amusement at Lizzie’s “silly inconsistent woman’s letter” (46), and his dismissal of her arrangement with Gilbert as “rather horrid” are offered as commentary, but they are also Charles’s attempt to recruit the reader to his side against people who are, in fact, telling him plain truths. Lizzie’s letter is the clearest case. She writes: “You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion!” (46), foreshadowing his long attempt to do so with Hartley. Charles reads the letter, calls it inconsistent, notes the “quiet outburst of resentment” (47), and concludes he can “let the matter drift” (53). The distorted perspective of his jealousy appears again here, and rather than considering what she says, he decides that she is speaking from a place of stereotypically feminine emotion. By the time this chapter ends, Charles’s reliability as a narrator is already in question, despite his attempts to influence the reader’s interpretation of events.