I Know Why The Caged Monster Cries—on The Narrative Strategies Of The Fifth Child And Ben, In The World

The British writer Doris Lessing is praised as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf by the British media. She has created over 50 works and has been nominated for plenty of world-class awards in literature. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in British literature. In 2007 her masterpiece The Golden Notebook won her the Nobel Prize in Literature and she became the 11 th female and the oldest winner ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. In 2008 she was ranked fifth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” by The Times.Since the publication of Lessing’s first novel The Grass is Singing, she has tried various of writing themes and styles in her over 50 years of writing career. Her creative works covered a century and went through several phases like realism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. The writing style of her later novels(1980s-2008), including The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World, returned to realism and was regarded as an extension of her former works. Although those later novels are not so influential as her former works like The Grass is Singing or The Golden Notebook, they are still a significant part of Lessing’s writing career. The exploration of the writing skills, expecially the narrative skills in those novels, are worth attention and analysis.The Fifth Child is one of Lessing’s representative works in her later writing period. She represented a picture of normal people’s reactions when they were in the presence of an antipathetic child. Ben, in the World is a sequel to The Fifth Child which describes grown Ben’s experiences after he ran away from home. Lessing used multiple narrative skills in these two novels and the usage of those skills embodied her exploration and pursuit of a new type of writing. Meanwhile these strategies reflect Lessing’s tolerant thoughts about people who are different from ordinary beings. All the elements in the two novels make them be provocative of traditional novels. This thesis attempts to analyze the narrative strategies Lessing used in The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World and how she used the strategies to emphasize the distinct narrative effects from the perspective of narratology.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction part, discussion part and conclusion part.The first part is chapter 1 and is a brief introduction to Doris Lessing’s lifetime and her major works, the literature review of The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World both in China and abroad, a review of evaluation of narratology and the theoretical frame work of this thesis.The second part is the discussion part which includes three chapters to analyze the narrative strategies of these two novels from three aspects: narrative voice, focalization and narrative structure. Chapter 2 analyzes the multiple narrative voices including authorial voices and main characters’ voices in detail and tries to expound the impact of different voices for the construction of narrative texts. Chapter 3 is an analysis of variable focalizations in the two novels aiming to compare the effects of the shift of different focalizations on the construction of characters’ images and the distance between the characters and the readers. Chapter 4 is a detailed analysis of narrative structure of the novels from the perspective of narrative space and narrative time. This chapter mainly discusses the shift of space, the chronological order and the time frequency in the novels and tries to find out the function of this kind of narrative skills.Chapter 5 is the conclusion part and is a brief summary arguing the reason of Ben’s tragedy and discusses the humanity and human nature, the effects and significances of Lessing’s narrative strategies in The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World, and Lessing’s own opinions on the treatments to the minority.