The Study On The "Marginal Man" In Doris Lessing’s Novels

As a writer who was born in Persia,grew up in Rhodesia and returned back to London after the World War II,Doris Lessing has developed many marginal qualities.The multiple marginal identities have not only brought her tremendous anxiety and mental stress,but also exerted a profound impact on her works.Throughout her entire writing course,the marginal man is an important figure that she has portrayed.The three works in the mid-to-late 1980 s initiated her returning to the realistic writing style in her later works.This paper takes these three works as research objects,and uses the marginal man as the entry point of the research to analyze the marginal characters in a systematic way.Through discussing their marginal mentality,existence characteristics and revolt ways,this paper explores the reasons of the formation of the marginal man,and how Lessing uses the narrative strategy to shape the marginal characters,and at the same time analyses the meaning of Lessing’s works about marginal man based on her own life experiences and creation ideas.This paper focuses on the image of marginal man in the metropolis.According to their different attitudes in the marginal situation,they are divided into three kinds: people who are isolated by the mainstream group under the same social and cultural background,people who are squeezed by powerful culture in the conflict of heterogeneous culture and people who take the initiative to self-exile.The process,performance,and causes of their marginalization vary,and their breakout postures when facing distress are also different,but the result of their struggles for survival is doomed to the fate of failure.Lessing’s concern for marginal men not only brings them into the sight of mainstream society and seeks a path of self-identification for them and herself,but also shows her reflection on practical problems in the hegemonic era,discussion of human living conditions,and exploration of the value of human life.In the era of multicultural symbiosis,Lessing takesLondon as the carrier to explore some heterogeneity issues in the contemporary urban society by shaping the marginal characters and raise the voices of vulnerable groups in The Times and society.Based on this,Lessing hopes to break the binary opposition and the one-way thinking inertia of black or white,and guide people to learn to question the authority,reflect on the mainstream culture,and re-understand the world with a new mode of thinking.