A Narrative Analysis Of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories

Doris Lessing(1919-),winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007,is one of the most distinguished writers of recent decades and has been hailed as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf.In 1950,Lessing published her first novel The Grass Is Singing,which almost enabled her gain fame and success overnight for this novel reveals racial oppression and conflicts of African colonies profoundly.Soon afterwards she published a serious of enlightening novels and collections of short stories that focus on African issues,including her Collected African Stories of which I will make an analysis in this paper.Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories collected short stories in her early writing career.These short stories are of vital importance in Lessing’s long and prolific career,since they established Lessing’s significance in the literature circle at that time Moreover,the themes of these works recur frequently in her later work.To understand her African stories,as it were,is to know the salience of all her works.Although there are a great many experts and scholars who have analyzed Lessing’s early African works from various aspects,most of these analyses concentrate on some novels,such as The Grass Is Singing.Besides,few of them have made analysis of how Lessing denounces the evil effects of racism and colonialism from the aspect of narratology Inspired by Lessing’s creative approach-"themes suit writing techniques",this paper will mainly apply Genette’s narrative theory,and focus on the narrator,narrative focalization,and the narrative space to elaborate on how Lessing adopts these narrative techniques to serve her themes,which is exposing and criticizing the evils of racism and colonialism.By exploring the narrative power of Lessing’s Collected African Stories from the angles of narrators,narrative focalization,and narrative space,we can approach Lessing and her colonial stance from another aspect different from others.