Deconstruction Theory On Mara And Dann: An Advrnture

Doris May Lessing (1919-) is considered as one of the most importantcontemporary English women writers after Virginia Woolf. She is a novelist, short storywriter, essayist, poet, nonfiction writer, dramatist, and journalist and travel writer.Lessing has penned more than40books, including many science fictions, novels, plays,memoirs, opera scores and autobiography. Her masterpiece The Golden Notebook wonher Nobel Prize in literature in2007. A great variety of critics are attracted by such adistinguished writer both at hone and abroad. Her works are probed from various angles,including feminism, Marxism, psychological perspective and Sufism. And hermasterpiece The Golden Notebook obtains the most attention among critics. However,her science fiction: Mara and Dann: an Adventure has obtained little attention fromcritics. This novel developed a rich imagination of the future world.It describes a seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abductedfrom their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village,Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as muchby an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of RockPeople. Eventually they join the great human migration north, away from the droughtthat is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water andfood to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rifewith crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature asabout how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Maraand Dann is imaginative fiction at its best. This work is full of all kinds of mythologicalarchetype and metaphors. Such rich text provides various possibilities for us to acceptand interpret it from different angles. The Deconstruction of Derrida offers us a newmedium to break the western traditional metaphysics and analyze the multiple impliedmeaning in the text. This paper is based on the relevant theories of deconstruction.The thesis falls into four chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces Doris Lessing and hercreative writing, and then the target novel, Mara and Dann: an Adventure and thepurpose of this study. Chapter two makes a general introduction to Derrida’s deconstruction. It first analyses the deconstruction of the text narration in this novel. Itthen analyses the narrative deconstruction of Utopia in this novel, the deconstruction ofmale utopia, the deconstruction of modern civilization. At last it introduces thedeconstruction of the whole ecological. Although Lessing describes a bleak future earthafter the ecological disasters, she is still optimistic about the future of human beings.The essay points out that by means of a deconstructive reading strategy, readerscan transcend the barrier between the diachronic narrative and the synchronic structure.Based on this interpretation, the essay tries to enable the readers to fin answers to someprofound questions about the novel.