A Wordless Statement:a Narrative Study Of The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook published in 1962 is widely acknowledged as Doris Lessing's greatest work. Because of its richness and profoundness in human studies, it has been seized by many critical schools as their polemics. In answer to various interpretations, Lessing came forward in the preface to the 1972 version and established the themes of the book as disintegration and unity.The two themes are not only manifested through their infiltration into every aspect of the protagonist's life, but also are embodied in the very narrative form of the book. At first, the protagonist Anna tries to resist disintegration by ordering her life into four different notebooks and two fictions, but later, finding the attempt futile, she gives up categorization and incorporates them into one single book-the Golden Notebook. Meanwhile, she has to learn to modify the disordered accounts of her confused mind into one of unity.The purpose of the present thesis is to unravel the correlation between the theme(s) and the narrative form of The Golden Notebook by recourse to some theories of narratology. In the process of analysis, the narrative tense, focalization, narratorial position, structural model, story development, text organization, and other narrative aspects are examined and formulated so as to demonstrate Lessing's wonderful experiment with her personal fictional art. To convey a truthful message about modern life trapped in dilemma, her employment of (un)conventional narrative strategies in the novel succeeds in sending forward "a wordless statement", of the modern theme of disintegration and unity and of the author's thinking in novel as a genre.