A Study On Narrative Focalization Of Doris Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four And Five

Doris Lessing(1919-2013) was honored as a Noble Prize winner in 2007 for her great achievements of literature. Her works are related to multiple themes, such as racialism, colonialism, feminism and Sufism. The great achievements of Lessing’s works are the diversities of themes and narrative techniques. Look back upon her life, she spent her childhood and adolescence in South Africa and then she moved to London and lived there till the end of her life. Lessing’ experience influences her literature themes and writing styles to a large extent. Lessing read a lot of realism novels of 19 th century and witnessed the racial discrimination of colony during the life of Africa. So her early work The Grass is Singing is written for the discussion of racialism theme with traditional narrative techniques. During her life in London, Lessing concerns about the discussions of more social issues, such as capitalism, socialism and feminism, the themes of her works become more various. And Being affected by Sufism and psychology of Jung, Lessing starts to explore human consciousness and individual self-cognition. She adopts flexible narrative techniques to convey the discussions. During the last stage of her literature career, Lessing created five space fictions with an overall title Canopus in Argos: Archives’, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is the second novel of the series which is created in 1980. The thesis will study the novel in the perspective of its narrative focalization. The narrative focalizations adopted in the novel, the shifts between different focalization and the literature effects of shifting narrative focalization which are the portrayal of images and communication between the narrator and readers will be analyzed.The thesis consists of three parts: Chapter One to Chapter Three is the first part. In this part, a brief survey of research background, literature review and theoretical frame work are offered.The second part is the core part of the thesis, which includes Chapter Four and Chapter Five. Different narrative focalization adopted in the novel and the literature effects of the shifts between them will be analyzed according to the portrayal of images of the characters and the interaction between readers and the narrator.The last part of the thesis is Chapter Six in which the summary of the whole study of the thesis will be made. And the limitations of the study and the suggestions for the further study will be presented in this part.