Unique Narrator, Profound Theme

The present dissertation adopts an integrated approach to study how the unique narrator the protagonist Anna in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook organizes the narrative form and constructs the profound theme of the novel.Doris Lessing's novels are the most outstanding by a woman to appear in British fiction since Virginia Woolf among which The Golden Notebook has been regarded as her most influential book, and has evoked significant response in the area of criticism. Based on the former researches on GN and on the theories of narratology and stylistics, the present dissertation tries to dispel the misleading criticism and applying the intersected aspect of point of view to explore the profound theme of the novel through analyzing the unique roles the narrator plays. Although narratology and stylistics are different in subjects, orientations and purposes, they come to the intersection at the point of view. In the field of narratology, the two constituents of point of view, focalization and voice, are defined and differentiated. In the field of stylistics, specific linguistic models are employed to identify focalization and narrative voice. In doing so, the confusion of narratological classification of point of view is dispelled; and the linguistic features within stylistics provide evidence for the identification of focalization and narrative voice, thus constructing the investigation on a more adequate and convincing basis. The application of flexible focalization breaks the omniscient form of traditional novel, and the process of constructing the special self-narrative forms reveals the profound theme of the novel. This dissertation tries to apply the theories of self-narrative form in social constructionist psychology to analyze the process of how the protagonist Anna constructs the narrative form by adopting various focalizations and speech presentations in order to reveal the profound theme of disintegration and unity.