A Way To Freedom:a Thematic Interpretation Of The Summer Before The Dark From The Perspective Of Bergson’s Philosophy Of Life

Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is one of the most prominent contemporary English writers. She won Nobel Prize in literature in2007and is regarded as the greatest woman writer after Virginia Woolf in Britain. The Summer Before the Dark, published in1973, is taken as the best novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.This novel dwells on Kate’s emancipation from surface self and exploration for freedom. Twenty-five years’ family life and social convention have turned Kate into a woman without fundamental self and freedom. Due to an occasional chance, Kate gets an opportunity to get on a summer journey. In the summer journey, Kate makes a series of seal dreams and memory of her friend Mary.Henri Bergson puts forward the conception of duration, a perspective of psychological time. He divides time into two kinds. The first kind is real time, which is also called duration which is achieved only by deep introspection; the other is a kind of clock time in space. Henri Bergson states there are two kinds of selves in correspondence with the two kinds of time. The self in real time is fundamental self which can express our true feelings and inner conscious state; the self in space time is surface self which confines and represses us. Freedom and fundamental self can only be obtained by deep introspection in duration.The writer of this thesis analyzes Kate’s exploration for freedom from the perspective of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of life: shedding the surface self in space to reconstruct the fundamental self in duration to get freedom. Kate makes efforts to search for her fundamental self in two kinds of duration: the seal dreams and memory of Mary. In the two kinds of duration, Kate finally gets her fundamental self and freedom.