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<title> Impossible happiness </title>
This essay is a discussion of the theme of Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child, and an attempt to describe the importance of the setting for that theme. I think the setting is very important for what I see as the main theme.

It took a while for me to think about what could be the main theme of this story. It was quite clear from the beginning that it had to do with happiness, with being a happy family. It is of course true that another reader might see an entirely different theme, but that is always the case when reading a story, different people interpret it in different ways. 

In my opinion the main theme is the impossibility to achieve perfect happiness, if there even is such a thing. Harriet and David try very hard to achieve something that almost nobody else has, and it seems like nobody believes in them. Both of them come from families that weren't particularly happy, David's parents are divorced, for example, so they want to be different in creating a perfect family. Their relatives tell them to wait with having children, that they are buying a house that is too big for them, etc. But they don't listen to what people tell them, and it seems like they have been successful in achieving this perfect happiness until their fifth child, Ben, is born. His birth marks the end of the happiness, and I think he is the symbol of the impossibility to be perfectly happy. It is almost as if he were a punishment for wanting to be something out of the ordinary. Harriet also thinks of him as a punishment, she even thinks of herself as evil. Her way of thinking becomes clear on page 29, when she talks to David about Sarah's daughter, who has Down's syndrome. "Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child." The fact that she has always been thinking this way, in terms of punishment and reward, makes it easier for her to think of Ben as a punishment for having tried to be happier than other people.

Ben isn't only a "punishment", he is also the proof that happiness can't last forever, that it is so easily lost. It takes so little to destroy what seems perfect. It is almost as if he came just to bring the family back to the "real world". And by doing that, he even makes their situation worse than other people's. Sarah and William, for example, who also have a child that isn't "normal", are still happier, since everybody loves their little girl. Ben, on the other hand, makes everybody avoid the Lovatts, and come up with strange excuses not to visit them. Even their older children leave to go to boarding school at the end. So by trying to be happier then everybody else, Harriet and David end up in a worse situation. When Ben starts school, and brings home his "friends", the group of young criminals, it is almost as if the outside world comes in to the family's perfect one, to continue the destruction from inside.

The setting of the story is naturally important for this theme. The geographical setting is the small town near London, that gets more and more criminalised, according to the description on page 29-30. I see this town with all its crime and vandalism as a contrast to what the Lovatts try to achieve. The line on page 29 "...guarding their stubborn individuality..." and "Outside this fortunate place, their family, beat and battered the storms of the world", clearly show their wish to be different. Their relatives, (the social setting) are also important, since it's they, who in the beginning, try to talk Harriet and David out of buying the house and having so many children so soon. It is almost as if they knew that the couple wouldn't be able to keep up this happiness forever. The entire section on page 28-31 seems almost too good to be true. The description of the extremely happy family in contrast to the outside world makes the reader wait for something terrible to happen. The thought that comes up is that this simply can't last.

It is quite clear, at least to me, that this story deals with the struggle to achieve something that doesn't exist (to me, there is no such thing as perfect happiness). The author makes this clear by creating a setting that is a total contrast to this happiness, and shows that the Lovatts' situation is completely out of the ordinary and that it won't last. And then their fifth child is born, and with his birth all their dreams are destroyed, almost as if he came just to tell them that they weren't allowed to have something that others don't.
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