Illness Narrative in Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210313.058How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Doris Lessing, The Diary of a Good Neighbour, illness narrative, emplotment

Abstract

The Diary of a Good Neighbour, a novel by Doris Lessing in 1983, reflects Lessing’s considerations on the motifs of aging, illness, social care, etc. In the form of dairy narrated by the first-person protagonist Jane Somers, this novel could also be regarded as an illness narrative encompassing Jane’s meticulous care of a lonely senior woman Maudie. This paper analyzes the characteristics of Jane’s illness narrative from the perspective of Peter Goldie’s narrative theory of “emplotment”. According to Goldie, the most remarkable features of illness narrative are coherence, meaningfulness and emotional import, which are all represented in The Diary. By using illness narratives authentically and aesthetically, the novel consequently helps to raise social awareness about the predicament of older women in infirmity and encourages social members to think over a better solution.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chen Su
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/03/15
TI  - Illness Narrative in Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Language, Communication and Culture Studies (ICLCCS 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 307
EP  - 311
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210313.058
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210313.058
ID  - Su2021
ER  -