The Metafictional Impulse In The Golden Notebook

Doris May Lessing is one of the most prominent and prolific contemporary English writers. The year 2007 witnessed 88-year-old Lessing winning Nobel Prize for literature–long before this worldwide literary glory, she was firmly established in literature in the 1960s.Of all her writings, The Golden Notebook has been regarded as her masterpiece. Since its publication in 1962, this novel has been widely criticized and commented on from different scholarly perspectives in the literary field: some have made thematic studies of this tour de force, some from the psychological perspective, others from the philosophical point of view, and still others from the political stance, so on and so forth.But there is an endless literary and scholarly debate about the classification of this novel: some scholars hold this novel as a realist book, some claim it as a modernist novel, and others argue that it is a postmodernist fiction. The present research does not stop at an easy labeling just as some other scholarly study. Taken into consideration the predominant postmodern tendency since the World War II, The Golden Notebook cannot at least evade the overwhelming influence of the postmodern writing techniques, language, or the metafictional tendency.In view of this, the present thesis aims at a study of the metafictional elements in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Although some critics have noticed the metafictional impulse in the novel, a deep and systematic study of the metafictional strategies has not been given due critical attention both at home and abroad. Based on a relatively detailed textual analysis, this study endeavors to make an exploration of the metafictional features of this text by elaborating on self-reflexivity, parody and uncertainty in The Golden Notebook.This thesis consists of four parts. Introduction is in Part I. It includes a brief introduction to Doris Lessing and her masterpiece The Golden Notebook. It also includes the literature review of The Golden Notebook and the interpretation of purpose of this thesis. And Part II interprets metafictional strategies as well as the definitions of metafiction. The major metafictional features are self-reflexivity, parody and uncertainty.As a major part of this thesis, Part III makes an elaborate and systematic analysis of the three metafictional elements in The Golden Notebook. This part is subdivided into three sections: an analysis of self-reflexivity, of parody and of uncertainty in this novel respectively. Anna, the self-conscious narrator, lays bare the fictionality of Ella who is fictionalized in the yellow notebook, exposes the paradoxical nature of language, and displays the writing process. Therefore, the line between reality and fiction is blurred. The parody of the realistic conventions, of Joyce's Ulysses, and of Oedipus in the mythology reveals the relationship between past and present. And uncertainty of the subject and of the plot explodes the relationship between reader and text.This research leads to a conclusion that these metafictional elements destroy illusion of reality and blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, between art and life, and between fiction and literary criticism. In addition, these elements break down readers'expectations and draw their attention much more to the process of writing than the content of the novel.