The Subversion Of Male Authority: Analysis Of Unreliable Narration In Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

For decades,Doris Lessing had ceaselessly made innovative experiments in the artistic form of her works.The Cleft is a specially designed novel with profound significance.And this thesis intends to explore how and why Doris Lessing uses unreliable narration in the novel by drawing on James Phelan’s discussion on unreliability.In the first place,this thesis investigates the unreliability of the narrator,who tries to mask himself as a reliable narrator.It will labor on the historian narrator’s misreporting and underreporting on the axis of events and facts,and then continue to present a detailed elaboration on the unreliable narration on the axis of values and judgments,namely,the narrator’s mistaken value system which yields an insufficient interpretation of an event,character,or situation as well and jeopardizes his reliability.And then it launches an analysis of the decreasing reliability due to the narrator’s lack of knowledge.Despite the narrator appears to be ridiculing at the absurdity of the male-defined history and conventions,he himself is bitterly caught in the social normative gender relations and is a conventional male-centered person both in his writing career and personal life.But he does not realize that.Based upon the discussion on the narrator’s unreliability,this thesis tries to explain the intention of Lessing in her use of unreliable narration by pointing out thatshe aims to refresh readers’ historical consciousness and to subvert the deep-rooted masculine ideology in literature and history.In conclusion,this thesis attempts to argue that through the exposure of unreliability of male narration,Doris Lessing invites women to refresh their historical consciousness,to understand that their sufferings lie in the male-defined discourse and social constructs,and to deconstruct the male-centered authority.Thus The Cleft is Lessing’s call for women to reconstruct history,to revolutionize things and to change their own lives with their unique intellectual power.In this sense,Lessing’s The Cleft is as revolutionary and significant as her The Golden Notebook in terms of the exploration of gender issues.