The Sunbather, “A Woman on the Roof”
Three construction workers atop one roof notice an attractive woman sunbathing atop a neighboring roof. The oldest worker is middle-aged, the youngest just a teenager and the third about halfway between. Each take a different approach to the sight of the woman who suddenly removes the scarf covering her breasts and proceeds to ignore their presence entirely. The story takes place a torrid heat wave and ultimately the point is about the social, economic and cultural barriers capable of separating people across great divides even as they are geographically in proximity to one another.
Fred Danderlea, “Mrs. Fortescue”
That the title of this story is not named after what is clearly its protagonist and main character is a clue to the symbolic nature of its construction. It is a story of a teenage boy’s coming of age and loss of innocence, but though the title character is a well-past-her-prime prostitute, it is utterly absent of any explicit sexuality. Instead, sexuality is implied through Freudian metaphor (a gun as phallic symbol) and insinuated symbolism (Fred's incestuous longing for his sister).
Josef Stalin, “The Day Stalin Died”
Stalin is not an actively engaged character in the narrative, but he is significant as a character due to the way his presence lingers over the entire story. Most importantly, however, is the extent to which his death and the reaction of those around her impact the narrator, who has been an active member of the Communist Party during the McCarthy/HUAC era in which the story is set. Lessing reveals the extent to which people we don’t even know can wield such influence over our lives even as we do about the daily tasks of existence.
The Grinning Man, “To Room Nineteen”
Again, it is a character who appearances are not at plentiful as the protagonists and important supporting characters who becomes a central player in the thematic tapestry that Lessing is working out in her fiction. The protagonist is Susan Rawlings, a fairly normal if more intelligent than average young wife in the twelfth year of marriage to a man who has just recently cheated on her. She forgives his transgression, but is soon engulfed in a state of depression which she responds to with a strange sort of Bartleby-esque mental breakdown characterized by an obsessive desire for privacy which becomes a de facto rejection of the rest of the world. At which point the phantom menace of the young man—what Susan terms a demon and which she recognizes as illusory projection of her wounded mind—leaps from inside her head and into the garden with his sinister grin and crooked stick.
