The Search for Identity in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist and Abdallah Thabit’s The Twentieth Terrorist

Abstract

This paper investigates the search for identity in two culturally diverse novels, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (1985) and Abdallah Thabit’s autobiographical novel The Twentieth Terrorist (2006). The paper examines how identity crisis makes Lessing’s heroine, Alice, squat with a group of radicals in London and be drawn into their terrorist activities, and makes Zahi, the protagonist of Thabit’s novel, accept being recruited by extremist religious group. However, the findings of this study prove the transformation of both Alice and Zahi. Alice is a different woman at the end of the novel and Zahi escapes from being the terrorist number 20 of the September 11th attack.