Narrative Time In The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing is recognized as one of the most important contemporary British writers. She offers readers worldwide remarkable literary productions with her multi-themes, independent vision and daring experiments. Published in 1962, The Golden Notebook is widely acknowledged as her masterpiece. The novel with its multilayered structure makes a perfect case for narrative discourse analysis.The aim of the present thesis is to unravel the correlation between the themes and the temporal art based on Gerard Gennete's theory. Genette's study focuses on the mode of story presentation, discussing narrative tense in order, duration and frequency. The Golden Notebook represents Lessing's complex sense of narrative time which matches well with Genette's notion of narrative time, perfectly demonstrated by its narrative strategies, such as anachrony, achrony, narrative cadence and repeating narrative.Concerning narrative order, Lessing completely discards the chronological linearity and permits anachrony to permeate the narrative. The novel is the projection of chaotic reality on the protagonist's consciousness. Concerning narrative duration, five cadences in The Golden Notebook accentuate the temporal discontinuity, leaving a clear deviation from the story order. Besides, it also indirectly exhibits Anna's anxiety about fragmentation. Concerning narrative frequency, repeating narratives would diversify the same event in terms of either the style or the perspective, reflecting that the protagonist is still in the impasse of her self-assertion.To convey an important message about modern woman trapped in modem dilemma, Lessing's employment of unconventional narrative time strategies in the novel succeeds in conveying "a wordless statement" of her modern theme. Through her representation of fragmentation of narrative time, Lessing has presented one of the characteristics of postmodern fiction.