Andrew Sklar
LIT2020: Ms. Anderson
Critical Analysis #3
Due Date: Thursday, July 23, 2015
To Room Nineteen: Themes/Images In the short story To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing there are many different themes/images that are appear and are thought of throughout the whole story. When I was doing a close reading of the story, I noticed that there were really three main themes that I thought Lessing talked about the most. The first is the feminine image theme. She shows this throughout the whole story symbolically by showing women who ran away from the social structures imposed by the existing patriarchal order. Although many people just simply run away from their problems and start over, Susan did not do that. When reading the story I began to think that when she talked about the garden, the river, the demon, and Susan’s reflection in the mirror she was actually foreshadowing Susan’s later coming suicide. When Lessing says, “She looked at the river and closed her eyes and breathed slow and deep, taking it into her being, into her veins” (Lessing), I believe that she was slowly breathing in death. White was also used a lot to describe things in the story which represents terror and death. Susan then goes on and says, ““as if life had become a desert” (Lessing). This is just another constant symbol that she was hopelessness and just wanted to probably leave the world. All of this shows that in order to escape social structures, women sometimes were forced to a very extreme solution, committing suicide. The next theme and image that I noticed a lot was water. Water was used in the story to show the Rawlings marriage, the emotional turmoil, and the gradual downfall of Susan’s ego. At the beginning of the story, Susan was very satisfied with how everything in her life was going. As the story started to go on, things started to change. I feel like the