Religious Allusions
In The Fifth Child author Doris Lessing uses the literary device of allusions to depict the characters, settings, scenes, symbols and the novel as a whole on a religious level. As a result, the characters, settings, scenes, symbols and the novel as a whole are portrayed in both the conventional way of a story and in the unorthodox meaning of their religious significance. The main character of Ben, Ben’s gang, and the scene of a helpless Ben lying in his mother’s arms are just a few examples of characters, settings, and symbols used by Lessing to convey religious connotations. Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child should be construed and analyzed in terms of religious allusions as well as in the conventional tradition. Author Doris Lessing portrays several of the characters in the novel on a religious level in addition to their literary purpose. ... As Knopf comments: The Christian connotations of the names of the male children, especially Paul and Luke, are unmistakable and this layer of meaning is reinforced by the way the entire family regularly assembles from far and wide to celebrate the great festivals of the religious year (133). ... If the story is construed on a religious level Ben can be seen as Jesus since they were both outcasts. ... Author Doris Lessing also uses symbols, settings, and scenes to convey their religious purpose. ... Another major religious allusion in The Fifth Child is the importance of the number five. ... While Lessing does not use the five points of the star as they represent Gawain’s heroic or religious qualities, she may have used the idea of the unbroken line that forms the star to represent an evolutionary pattern, for Ben is the gene that could have come down through the centuries, an evolutionary throwback to the more negative aspect of mankind’s origins (120). ... Like the Gawain poet Browne names many natural and religious associations with the number five: the fingers and toes, the petals of many flowers, the Pentateuch, and the five loaves (120).