Abstract:

Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, is a famous British woman writer of recent decades. The Fifth Child is Lessing’s important work. It tells a horrible story of a middle-class family. Ben is imprisoned by the families and suffers inhuman treatment. This paper analyzes the indifference and alienation of human nature from the behaviors and attitudes of the family members and social groups. And it also discusses the main causes of the tragedy, which arises people’s reflection and self-examination on his or her own family in modern society.

Keywords: Doris Lessing; The Fifth Child; tragedy; alienation of human nature

摘  要：

多丽丝·莱辛是当代著名的英国女作家，她于2007年获得了诺贝尔文学奖。多丽丝·莱辛是位多产作家，她的写作风格多变，思想深邃，作品涉及的主题广泛。她的小说《第五个孩子》集中体现了人性异化这一主题，是她探讨社会问题的一部重要作品。本文主要从家庭内部成员以及社会群体对社会边缘人的态度和行为进行分析，解读主人公悲惨命运的成因，说明现代社会人与人之间的隔膜与孤立，传达异化社会的精神特质对现代文明社会中家庭以及个体的深刻反思。

关键词：多丽丝·莱辛；《第五个孩子》；悲剧；人性异化

1  Introduction
1.1  Doris Lessing and Her The Fifth Child
Doris Lessing is a famous British writer. Lessing’s parents were British, and she was born in Iran in 1919. She is one of the most celebrated and splendid writers of recent decades, and she is praised as the greatest woman writer after Virginia Woolf in the 20th century. Doris Lessing writes more than fifty novels, two autobiographies, plenty of poems, dramas, and essays.
Her major works include The Grass is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962), Children of Violence Series (1952-1969), Memories of a Survival (1974), The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), The Fifth Child (1988) and so on. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. The Swedish Academy praised Doris Lessing by saying “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”A Companion of Honor and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award, and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. The Fifth Child was published in 1988. It is not as popular as her other two novels—The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook. “Compared with previous out-space fictions, it is a great literature creation which belongs to realistic style.”