Several critics have called The Good Terrorist's title an oxymoron. Robert Boschman suggested it is indicative of Alice's "contradictory personality"[34] – she renovates the squat's house, yet is focused on destroying society.[34] In The Hudson Review, George Kearns wrote that the title "hovers above the novel with ... irony".[35] The reader assumes that Alice is the "good terrorist", but that while she may be a good person, she is "rotten at being a terrorist".[35] Writing in World Literature Today, Mona Knapp concluded that Lessing's heroine, the "good terrorist", is neither a good person, nor a good revolutionary.[36] She knows how to renovate houses and manipulate people to her advantage, but she is unemployed and steals money from her parents.[36] When real revolutionaries start using the squat to ship arms, she panics[36] and, going behind her comrades' backs, makes a telephone call to the authorities to warn them.[31] Knapp called Alice "a bad terrorist and a stunted human being".[36] Fishburn suggested that it is Lessing herself who is the "good terrorist", symbolised here by Alice, but that hers is "political terrorism of a literary kind",[31] where she frequently disguises her ideas in "very domestic-looking fiction",[31] and "direct[ly] challenge[s] ... our sense of reality".[31]
Kuehn described Alice as "well-intentioned, canny and sometimes lovable",[3] but as someone who, at 36, never grew up, and is still dependent on her parents.[3] Yelin said Alice is "in a state of perpetual adolescence",[27] and her need to "mother everyone" is "an extreme case of psychological regression or failure to thrive".[37] Greene wrote that Alice's "humanitarianism is ludicrous in her world",[38] and described her as "so furiously at odds with herself" because she is too immature to comprehend what is happening and her actions vary from being helpful to dangerous.[39]
Boschman called Lessing's narrative "ironic"[40] because it highlights the divide between who Alice is and who she thinks she is, and her efforts to pretend there is no discrepancy.[40] Alice refuses to acknowledge that her "maternal activities"[41] stem from her desire to win her mother's approval and, believing that her mother has "betrayed and abandoned" her,[41] turns to Jasper as a way to "continue to sustain her beliefs about herself and the world".[41] Even though Jasper takes advantage of her adoration of him by mistreating her, Alice still clings to him because her self-image "vigorously qualifies her perception of [him], and thus proliferates the denial and self-deception".[42] The fact that Jasper has turned to homosexuality, which Alice dismisses as "his emotional life",[43] "suits her own repressed desires".[44] Kuehn called Alice's obsession with the "hapless" and "repellent" Jasper "just comprehensible",[3] adding that she feels safe with his gayness, even though she has to endure his abuse.[3]
Knapp stated that while Lessing exposes self-styled insurrectionists as "spoiled and immature products of the middle class",[36] she also derides their ineptness at affecting any meaningful change.[36] Lessing is critical of the state which "feeds the very hand that terrorizes it",[36] yet she also condemns those institutions that exploits the working class and ignores the homeless.[36] Knapp remarks that Lessing does not resolve these ambiguities, but instead highlights the failings of the state and those seeking to overthrow it.[36] Scanlan compared Lessing's comrades to Richard E. Rubenstein's terrorists in his book Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World.[45] Rubenstein wrote that when "ambitious idealists" have no "creative ruling class to follow or a rebellious lower class to lead [they] have often taken upon themselves the burden of representative action",[46] which he said "is a formula for disaster".[46]
