In another place
Setting accentuates story in Doris Lessing’s Through the Tunnel, explored by Helen M Walters
Helen M Walters
This month’s story is a tale of a boy pushing himself up to and beyond his limits. As Doris Lessing observes in the preface of To Room Nineteen, the collection in which Through The Tunnel appears, this story has been much anthologised for, and proven popular with, children and young people despite the fact that she did not set out to write it for that audience.
Let’s take a look at what works well about the story and gives it such resonance for old and young alike. As always, spoilers follow and you will benefit most from this article if you read the story yourself, at http://writ.rs/wmfeb18
Through The Tunnel is set in a holiday destination somewhere away from the main character’s own country of residence. Despite not saying exactly where it is, Doris Lessing builds up a vivid sense for us of this exciting and challenging place in which the young boy finds himself. We know that the boy, Jerry, is on vacation with his mother, and we are told that the local boys he meets while playing on the beach are a ‘smooth dark brown’ and speak a language he doesn’t know, but which may be French.
But what really evokes the place are the precise and carefully chosen descriptions: the water is a ‘scoop of moving bluish green’ and shows ‘stains of purple’; rocks are described as ‘discolored monsters’ and swimming surrounded by tiny fish is like being in ‘flaked silver’. The descriptions really do conjure up the place visually. The story can be seen as a rite of passage or coming of age story. Jerry has to overcome his fear in order to move from one state of being to another. Note how, early on in the story, he is offered a choice between the ‘safe’ beach with his mother, and the dangerous rocky bay. He has to choose the dangerous place in order to grow up and move away from his mother’s protection. His first step towards bravery is coming out from under his mother’s wing and choosing his own path. Later on, when his mother thinks he is overdoing things and insists on his accompanying her to the ‘safe’ beach he sees it as a place for children. How does Doris Lessing indicate that the path Jerry is taking, away from his mother, could be a dangerous one? Note the reference to ‘rough sharp rocks’ in the bay he is attracted to, the indication that he feels lonely when he realises his mother is only a speck in the distance and the way he feels ‘desperate nervous supplication’ when he meets up with the group of much bigger boys, who are almost men, swimming off the rocks.