Doris A Sunrise on the Veld

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Doris Lessing
A SUNRISE ON THE VELD
The sunrise described in this story is a metaphorical dawning, the realization on the part of the
youth that he lives in a Darwinian world where only the fit survive the struggle for existence. Lessing
has written a classic initiation story, a stark account of a child getting his first intimations of mortality.
The story might be approached in class through a consideration of the setting. Lessing employs
a rich, evocative prose, paralleling the lushness of the veld with the boy’s emotional state. The snug
warmth of the bed gives way to the cold of the dark morning—the “chilled” earth, the “icy” steel. His
fingers are “numbed” and his legs “ache with cold.” The assault on his nervous system looks forward
to the shock to his innocence and self-absorption following his discovery of the mortally wounded
buck.
Through a pattern of animal imagery, Lessing suggests the boy’s mindless exuberance, a
“superfluity of youth,” and his identification with the natural world. He springs out of bed “like a fish
leaping from water.” He creeps abroad “alert as an animal,” seeking the “animal trails.” He leaps “like
a duiker.” He answers the call of the “guinea fowl.” He emerges from the dark tunnel” of foliage with
the dogs as “companions” of his hunt.
With youth’s usual obliviousness to the idea of death, the protagonist leaves behind the
“cultivated part” of the farm and recklessly runs through the veld, “not carefully . . .but madly, like a
wild thing.” The narrator emphasizes the fact that the boy is “wild.” He is “yelling wild,
unrecognizable noises.” That “he could break his ankle at any moment” does not occur to him.
Shouting that he is fifteen, he experiences a kind of ecstasy, seeming to merge with “soil . . water . . .
air.” He feels omnipotent, invulnerable, and he insists that the world answer him back in kind. At the
ironic moment, he hears, like an echo, the “frightened screaming” and, instinctively, he calls out to his
dogs.
The boy’s ambivalence at his discovery is handled by Lessing with great delicacy. He asserts
his difference from the brute world by entertaining the idea that he can perform an “act of mercy” but,
at the same time, he strongly empathizes with the wounded buck. His proud boast, “There is nothing . .
. I can’t do,” becomes “There is nothing I can do.” He uses the words of his father—curse words. Try
as he may, he cannot escape the consequences of his self-knowledge: “the knowledge of fatality.” He
crushes ants as easily as they have crushed the buck, even finding some grim satisfaction in his “new
stoicism.”
Like the protagonist in Anderson’s “I Want to Know Why,” the boy only frames the question
by the end of the story. He believes that “the dark half of his mind” has outwitted time, but the sunlit
half must now assimilate the experience of growth and change.
FURTHER READING
http://lessing.tile.net/ (a private site, meticulously kept, many links)
http://ernie.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/UK-authors.html (#627)
Rowe, Margaret Moan. Doris Lessing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994
Sage, Lorna. Doris Lessing. New York: Methuen, 1983.
Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London: Routledge, 1989.