Fragment And Integration

Doris Lessing is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporaryBritish writer. She gives worldwide readers a remarkable literary production with hermulti-genred themes, specific vision and bold experiments, especially herrepresentative works---The Golden Notebook. The novel, written in1962, won herthe Nobel Prize for literature in2007for its form experimentation and the reflectionof society and spirit states in1950s, and became one of the masterpieces in the world.The Golden Notebook begins with a traditional short novel,“Free Women”,which is interrupted by fragments of four notebooks. The pattern,“Free Women” andthe four notebooks, in succession of black, red, yellow and blue, repeats four times.Then the golden notebook comes and the book ends with a final “Free Women”episode. This seemingly chaotic structure is carefully planned and it is a very highlystructured book with its meaning in the shape. However, the fragmented narrativestructure breaks the readers’ original cognitive frame and makes it hard for the readersto understand the novel’s theme and significance. Based on the cognitive process ofreading, this thesis mainly discusses the construction of the novel’s theme in readers’mind through a detail analysis of the novel text within the Text World Theory.This thesis consists of six parts: the introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two,Chapter Three, Chapter Four and the conclusion. The first part mainly introducesLessing’s life and works, literary review about The Golden Notebook as well as theresearch approach and process of this paper. Chapter one is about the Text WorldTheory, including its source, definition, different opinions between Werth and Gavinsand the application of the theory. The core content of this thesis is from Chapter twoto Chapter four.“Free Women” is a traditional narrative story with a completestructure, so it is necessary to analyze it separately. Chapter two constructs all theworlds of Anna, the heroine, to reflect the process of Anna’s spirit from fragment tointegration. Chapter three integrates the four notebooks and focus on the research ofAnna’s sub-worlds to reveal construction of the “Fragment” theme in readers’ mind.Chapter four analyzes “Golden Notebook”, and reveals Anna’s spirit integration and the cognitive process of the novel’ theme through character’s text world and final“World Repair”. The conclusion points out the analytic significance of Text WorldTheory for the unconventional discourse.