Ben, in the World

Ben, in the World

Author	Doris Lessing
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	2000
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	178
ISBN	0-06-019628-9

Ben, in the World is a novel written by Doris Lessing, published in 2000, in which she stages a parody of the 'objectivity' of the narrator's voice. The story delves into the life of Ben Lovatt following the events of the first book dedicated to this character, The Fifth Child.

Plot

Ben, in the World takes place a number of years after the events in The Fifth Child. Ben Lovatt, now eighteen, lives with an elderly woman in Mimosa House. When it comes to the point that the elderly woman can no longer take care of him, Ben sets out to find his place in the world. Knowing he would not be welcomed back by his family (and not wanting anything to do with them), he goes off on his own, first around England, then to southern France, Brazil, and finally to the Andes Mountains.

Characters

• Ben Lovatt. The fifth child of Harriet and David Lovatt, born different.
• The Lovatts. Ben's family. Consists of his mother Harriet, father David, and his siblings Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul.
• Mrs. Biggs. An elderly woman who looks after Ben for a while.
• Rita. A courtesan that Ben becomes interested in.
• Johnston. The owner of a minicab company and Rita's pimp.
• Alex. A film director and producer interested in making a movie about Ben.
• Teresa. A courtesan turned actress interested in helping Ben.

Reception

In his review for The New York Times, Michael Pye said the book "lets you see things as Ben sees them, as you have not seen things before. The book shares that uncanny effect with the best fiction."^[1] In her analysis of Lessing's experimental comments on literary genre, Susan Watkins argues that by exaggerating the picaresque, Lessing forces her readers "to ask a series of questions about the meaning of the distinction between the animal and the human." Watson finds that Ben is "a marginal figure, critical of society but unable to find a place outside it", like a picaro hero. Lessing uses the figure of Ben "as a way to comment on a society experiencing intense social upheaval." While the traditional picaro is a semi-outsider, Ben is much more isolated. Furthermore, it is far more in doubt if he is able "to survive by his wits and turn a series of exploitative situations to his advantage (another feature of the genre)." Watkins observes that in Ben, in the World prolepsis is used to a humorous effect by which the 'objectivity' of the narrator's voice is being parodied. The device of omniscience is exaggerated so that the reader is made to see how naive it is to believe in what the narrator relates. Another effect of this is, according to Watson, that the reliability of perception is questioned and that any 'commons sense' judgments about Ben's alleged difference from others are called into doubt.^[2]

By its depicting an outsider, Ben, in the World has recently been seen as comparable to Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville, to The Metamorphosis (1912) by Franz Kafka, to The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus, to Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell, to The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison, and to Unaccustomed Earth (2008) by Jhumpa Lahiri.^[3]

References

1. Pye, Michael (2000-08-06). "The Creature Walks Among Us". nytimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-08-17.
2. Susan Watkins, Doris Lessing, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2010, ISBN 978-0-7190-7481-3, pp. 128-130.
3. C. Fred Alford: Politics Through Popular Fiction and Short Stories, Spring term 2014: "In one way or another, all the books and short stories in this course are all about outsiders. Some are outsiders by choice, most not. Each is an outsider in a different way."

External links

• PBS interview with Lessing