On Marginality In Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist

Doris Lessing (1919---), British novelist, poet, playwright, biographer and short story writer, isuniversally acknowledged as the most important woman writer in British literature after Virginia Woolf. Shewas awarded the2007Nobel Prize in Literature for The Golden Notebook. The Good Terrorist, published in1985, was shortlisted by the Booker Prize and won W·H·Smith Literary Award and the Montallo Award inItaly. It is a book about a group of jobless young people who play the role of both the good and terrorists. Itshows how this group of people degrade into the marginalized good terrorists with subtle exploration into theirmental and psychological state. Considering that most western and Chinese critics focus on the political themeand the loss of identity in the study of The Good Terrorist, there is relatively a less amount of researches aboutthe marginality theme. However, this novel mainly elaborates the mental and psychological state of a group ofmarginalized people in the society. Therefore, through close reading, this thesis aims to analyze themarginalized situation of Alice Mellings, the protagonist, in order to dig out the profound causes of humandegradation into terrorists in contemporary society. The main body of the thesis is divided into four chapters.The first chapter will define the concept of “marginality” according to the definitions given by Robert Park,George Simmel, Stonequist and some others. This thesis purports to integrate these definitions of marginalityso as to explore Alice Mellings’s marginalized situation from different perspectives. The first chapter alsoexplains the relationship between Doris Lessing’s creation of marginalized people and her own lifeexperiences. The second chapter investigates the marginalized predicament in which Alice Mellings wastrapped, chiefly from the feminist perspective. The third chapter carries out a psychological analysis of Alice’ssplit personalities, in hope of further reflecting her marginalized situation. The last chapter goes on to discussthe marginality theme of the novel on its discourse level, especially the transition of narrative perspectives andthe application of irony, by which readers are given the chance to penetrate into the protagonist’s inner mind.Thus it is much easier to appreciate the protagonist’s marginalized plight which is highlighted in all kinds ofcontradictory situations. This thesis intends to point out that both story and discourse play indispensable partsin portraying Alice the protagonist as a typical marginal figure in English society. Therefore the thesis comesto the conclusion that The Good Terrorist is more of a novel elaborating the marginalized people than apolitical one in the usual sense.