A Study Of The Mythical Narratives In William Golding's Novels

William Golding(1911-1993)is one of the fourteen British Nobel Prize winners for literature.On the rise of some critics' discussion about whether his novels are allegorical or mythical,Golding claimed on more than one occasions that he preferred the latter to the former.In terms of Levi-Strauss' s structural anthropology,the essential mythemes of the Flood,the Fall of Man and the Tower of Babel can all be found in the narrative discourses of Golding's thirteen novels.The recurring mythemes generate a complicated metaphorical and linguistic system for the novels,which seem to be vastly different from each other in characterization,event schema and plot devices,but actually have close affinities with those constituent units in the three classic myths.The novelist portrays characters that are insatiably greedy and unscrupulously depraved,describes events about human footprints in pre-historical time,the age of Hebrew and Greek Civilization,and disposes of plots in the Middle Ages as well as the modern and contemporary eras.By means of cannily reconstructing the classic myths and ingeniously designing almost all narrative discourses,Golding's novels not only elaborate on some universal phenomena in the history of human development,but also reflect the author's anxious concern and his dauntless criticism on contemporary technological progresses and interpersonal relationship in the incessantly civilized society.As existing studies at home and abroad have not discussed systematically the mythical narratives in Golding's novels,this dissertation,taking the Flood,the Fall of Man and the Tower of Babel as the points of reference,analyzes and interprets Golding's thirteen novels to rediscover their mythical narration and assess their artistic values for criticizing contemporary social reality.The first chapter expounds views that the Flood reflects prehistoric people's rich imagination about their realistic life which was influenced so much by natural floods that the classic myth not only voices man's universal superstitious ignorance and his everlasting fear of those grotesque phenomena in nature and universe,but also emphasizes that morality and spiritual baptism are indispensable factors for human living and social development.Golding's early works such as Lord of the Flies,The Inheritors,and Pincher Martin are excellent textbooks for contemporary spiritual guidance and moral enlightenment.In these novels,descriptions of characters' bodies and events become once and again the requisite mental signposts and turn the stories about kids' fun and game,noble savages or a weird ghost into contemporary variations of the Flood.What makes the three contemporary novels different from the classic myth of Flood lies in the fact that heterogeneous water in the novels impels a reader to enter into a dramatically larger space to think about behaviors of the characters who experience baptism in the sea,besides a river and a lake so as to reflect those disastrous effects of technological progresses which unexpectedly befall human beings in realistic society.The second chapter argues that the Fall of Man has very little to do with food taboos,and that the classic myth's core factors imply in essence ideological changes of early man's cognition about himself and the universe in the long evolutionary process instead.One of the benefits in the Fall of Man is that this classic myth inspires man to tell vices from virtues so that man would take timely efforts to avoid going astray in life.Based on contemporary activation and adaptation of the Fall of Man,Golding's Free Fall,The Pyramid,Darkness Visible and the sea trilogy(including Rites of Passage,Close Quarters and Fire Down Below)become literary models: they focus on a large number of characters' moral depravity as well as their evil human nature to reveal the harmful features of contemporary fall of man such as the fall's ubiquitousness,absurdity,invisibility,carnivalism,redeemability and unredeemability.The third chapter identifies the Tower of Babel as essentially the epitome of early human society and its cruel and affectless power system which reveals complicated interpersonal relationship in social material production and particularly the unpromising situations of human spiritual life.Centering on literary generative fields such as religion,academics and theocracy,Golding's Spire,The Paper Men,The Scorpion God,and The Double Tongue characterize,revise and restructure the classic myth of the Tower of Babel.In these novels,stories which mirror those pervasively existing struggles for social powers in different historical eras not only satirize the blind and paranoid beliefs of the dean of a church,the headman in the Scorpion kingdom as well as the Roman general and the priest in ancient Greece,but also denounce these characters as various Babel builders who are extremely hubristic and self-conceited and care little about other people's life or team work.In portraying these Babel builders who struggle unscrupulously for secular powers,the four novels illustrate some widespread experiences of arrogance in human history and reveal the colossal damages caused by people's extremely self-centered arrogance and voracity.Golding was affected so much by the Second World War and the international situations before and after the war that his thirteen novels construct new myths on the basis of the classic ones such as the Flood,the Fall of Man and the Tower of Babel.With these new myths,Golding encourages people to respond positively to the future courses of contemporary social civilization,zeitgeist and humanist beliefs by frequently describing elements such as anti-violence,anti-depravity and anti-voracity.While depicting those pervasive phenomena in human society in the past,at present and even in the future,the new myths constantly focus on contemporary people's concern about those hot issues such as war,violence,power,social positions,treasure etc.to expose the unexpected hideous social phenomena like bloody killing,voracious possession,self-centralism and so on.Through ostensibly presenting the characters' ordinary life and their time and energy on worthless trifles or mean tricks,those mythical narratives that deal with military affairs,politics,religion,history,education and culture contain significant meanings so that the thirteen novels function as active media to purify gradually people's mind and finally reform the society.In the process of obscurely expressing the author's grief,doubt and anxiety towards many contemporary people's ignoble goals in life and their ignominious practical targets,Golding's novels criticize in a subversive way the randomness and recreational tendency of the combative and restless masses towards control and balance mechanism of laws and regulations.The contemporary mythemes transformed from those in the Flood,the Fall of Man and the Tower of Babel finally become active stimuli to propel all people and present societies to move towards sublimity and help readers contemplate history,reality and future of human society.