A Perfect Relfection Of The Four Stages Of Sufi Wholeness

Regarded as the greatest female writer after Woolf, Doris Lessing won Nobel Prize inLiterature for her scepticism, fire and visionary power that have subjected a dividedcivilization to scrutiny. In1974, Lessing published her second inner space novel TheMemoirs of A Survivor, discussing how human beings deal with the unexplainedcatastrophe and finally survive it with efforts of pursuing self wholeness. However,compared with her other works including the masterpiece The Golden Notebook and herfirst novel The Grassing is Singing, The Memoirs of A Survivor has received much lessattention both at home and abroad. Among the essays and reviews on the novel, mostcritics blame Lessing for deviating her writing style to irrationalism and her attempt toapply Sufism to explore the individual’s inner world.Although Lessing has been consistently opposed to being labeled under any “ism”, heracceptance of Sufism from Idries Shah is perceptible in almost all her works from late1960s, even in her masterpiece The Golden Notebook. Lessing chooses Sufism as hervehicle to view the world and consider the relationship between individuals and society.Among the important concepts in Sufism, wholeness is one of the building blocks and theultimate goal of Sufis. The pursuit of wholeness is divided into four subsequent stages,from self becoming emptied, self becoming illuminated, self becoming adorned to finallyself having passed away.This paper intends to reinterpret the novel and provide a more just reading from theperspective of Sufism. The thesis intends to conduct a detailed study on how the characters,the narrator and Emily finally go through the four stages and achieve wholeness. The thesischooses the key concept “wholeness” in Sufism as the major theory to analyze the processof self inner growth. Meanwhile, a comparative study is conducted between the novel andLessing’s masterpiece The Golden Notebook which has failed to reach the final stage. Theimportance of this thesis lies not only in the discussion of Lessing’s views of humansurvival and personal development, but also in the significance of this particular novel withthe completion of Sufi wholeness.