Social security, poverty, inequality and social classes, these are some of the themes the short story “DHSS” by Doris Lessing deals with. The setting is in Britain during the conservative government in the 1980s. The DHSS is on a strike because their wages are too low. The story takes place over a very short period of time, it could be somewhere in between of half an hour and a two hours.
In the beginning we meet a woman, she is walking on the street and we very quickly find out what she is doing and why she is acting the way she does. The woman is caught in the system, and now that the DHSS is on a strike she is in a great trouble. She has to degrade herself to begging just so she can afford to buy food. We see that she is very uncomfortable with begging, and that it is probably not a situation she is used to, even though she is not in a rich part of society. On the contrary we can conclude that she comes from bad circumstances and has probably grown up in a poor area, she speaks in a restricted code and she has been on welfare for a long time. “The young woman was facing in, not out to the street, and she moved about there indecisively but with a stubborn look” (p. 1 line 1) The way she tries to hide her face and tries to be anonymous, indicates that she feels embarrassed and humiliated. The quotation also shows us that we are dealing with an objective narrator. He is an observer like us and therefore we do not know if his information is valid. He acts on his first impressions and to understand the story and the characters it is necessary to be critical, and to compare the information we get throughout the story. For instance, this could be, to tell us that the woman has a stubborn look on her face. But as we continue to read we may find out that it is not stubbornness but something else. It is a 3rd person narrator who writes from an external point of view.