The Study Of The Autobiographical Writing Of The Memoirs Of A Survivor

British modern female author,Doris Lessing(1919-2013),is famous for her rich ideas,changeable artistic style,peculiar imagination and skillful narrative skills.The Memoirs of a Survivor,published in 1974,is her attempt at an autobiography.Lessing adhered to the idea that the content was the core of the text and the form was created to serve the content at the time she created The Memoirs of a Survivor.In the novel,she made the narrative skills that popular before the realism came back.This article is going to analyze The Memoirs of a Survivor in three parts,including the construction of the text subject,the narrative structure of the autobiographical writing and the autobiographical value of the text,in order to discuss how Lessing identify herself and what her self concept and creation concept is.This paper includes three parts.The first part mainly discusses the construction of the text subject.Lessing took the spilt and multiple subjects instead of the single and complete subject.She made the subjects' identities with survivor,mother and daughter.Then she organized the materials to narrate the ego stories and the non ego stories.She also used autobiographical fiction to supplement the subjects' characters and to vivid her impression of the era.The construction of the environment also provided the background for the personality.Although fiction in the novel is used to modification the subject,but the core between the subject of the text and the subject of the history remain the same.The modification also is helpful to present Lessing's personal ideas.The second part is aim to know how the narrative structure construct in the text and what influence it will get.In the text,Lessing dispels the time sequence,by making the structure of the text unintentional and nonlinear,for making the scene structure play the main role in the text structure.So without the bound from the time,self expression in the text can be free.The scene structure is built by different scenes' combination and realized by transition between scenes.Lessing created a multiple parallel space-time system for the text world,and different space-time represent different period of her life.The narrator's ability to come through different spaces symbolize Lessing's discovery in her inner world.The scene structure also influences the characterization of the character and the viewpoint of the text.So the whole text has strong integrity and structure.The third part is to discuss the value that The Memoirs of a Survivor's autobiographical writing gets.Firstly,Lessing realized the attempt at an autobiography,by combing the past and reflecting the instant in one text.Secondly,the text is an autobiographical experiment.Lessing reformed the autobiographical writing by her text and showed her idea about time and self in the way she narrated.The innovation also brings strangeness cognition experience and richer information about Lessing to the readers.Thirdly,the autobiographical writing also has cultural enlightenment.This is an autobiography of a frontier,and it is helpful to the frontier's struggling for the discourse power.Besides,it is an autobiography of female.It also has special meaning for the female's autobiographical writing.In the conclusion,the paper points out that The Memoirs of a Survivor,is an experiment of autobiographical writing with innovation.The text reflects Lessing's personal concept about her past and time,responding to the modernism and the postmodernism.It represents pictures of era,with praising human's power and wisdom and looking forward to equal and freedom relationship between people.