Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

A continuous cycle of war and violence is the price to be paid for this prescribed amnesia, a fragmentation which transforms society into a band of bloodthirsty savages, a band of rat-dogs for whom combat is not a means to an end, but an end in itself (88). Although these savages are presented as animals, Lessing shows clearly that this is a representation of human society; the bodies of the rat-dogs are similar to human bodies in at least two ways. First, these animals walk on two legs, supposedly an evolution toward a more civilized existence; in fact, these animals are clumsy on two legs, and when they are tired or alone, they revert to four-legged locomotion. Also, their eyes are described as being adapted to walking on four legs; while walking on two legs the animals must twist their necks into awkward positions in order to see clearly. The rat-dogs’s eyes are the second link with humans: “the eyes of most human beings are sharp, knowing, clever and vain, like the eyes of the Rat-dogs” (the preceding descriptions are found on pages 76–79 of the novel). The obvious parallel between the rat-dogs and humans is not flattering toward the latter. Even more striking is the fact that dogs and rats are among the species which are often used as guinea pigs, in other words as laboratory animals destined to be tortured and killed in the interests of scientific research, whether biological or psychological. The link between these laboratory animals and human beings is even more unsettling during the animal’s performance of humanity.

Not only do the rat-dogs kill the monkeys which resemble humans and which are in the minority compared to other species in the novel, but they also fight amongst themselves. They are almost always in a state of aggression and violent sexual arousal; a male rat-dog even tries to mate with a female who is dying after giving birth (89). Like humans, the rat-dogs form their own kinds of institutions, the groups which remain constant even though the individual members come and go (74–75).