| Between 1952 and 1955 a number of new and articulate voices in British fiction began to claim public attention. For several years before, commentators had speculated about where or what the new generation was, wondered how the Second World War might be treated in serious fiction and worried that fatigue or public austerity might have been instrumental in a premature atrophy among the potentially creative. The new voices emerging from the war seemed to many comic and limited, often insular, interested in questions of food and class, and influenced, in one way or another, by an existential version of experience. They didn't demonstrate much concern with eternal verities or transforming visions of human experience. Alone among these emerging writers, although eventually noticed nearly as much as any of them, William Golding, from the appearance of Lord of the Flies in 1954, which was seen as a visionary dealing with universal and essential human issues, was not part of a group or a generation. For some, in both England and America, Golding was immune from the dominant temper of the age, from the bland muted, non-charismatic, comic safety of the carefully limited survivor; for others, Golding was both surly and reactionary, seen, as late as 1960 in an article in The Nation by Martin Green, as motivated by a 'sullen distaste' for the contemporary.Fueled by the previous critical reception of William Golding and his Lord of the Flies, and his polarity ideas, this thesis is intended to render a detailed, though by no means comprehensive, discussion of author's interpretation of human nature through his polarity values. The thesis is composed of the following parts:In the first chapter, a glimpse of author's polarity concept is provided. Although his statements are sometimes arch or cryptic, Golding's own essays and the interviews he has given are generally the best sources for the genesis and development of his ideas. He acknowledged that he had, in his fiction, always been a 'ideas man' rather than a 'character man', although he hoped that he might some day combine the two.Golding sees the polarity as universal, as a permanent quality that justifies its compressed elaborations in the novels. Although he always values most the side more difficult to apprehend, the mysterious or imaginative, the dark side, he never oversimplifies the issue. Yet within the fictional dramatizations of varieties of polarity, varieties that reveal his constantly interesting and imaginative mind, he does see the two sides of experience as identifiably separate, as pressures that pull the human being in different directions and comprise a constant source of human pain.Chapter two is mainly concerned with the opposition side of his polarity ideas. With Jack-Ralph model the best example, and Bacchae, the tragedy Golding heavily draws on, this chapter provides the origin, interpretation of the Apollonian-Dionysian polarity, and a detailed analysis of the antithetical characters of Jack and Ralph.Chapter three shows another side of Golding's polarity ideas. Man is sick as well as heroic. Piggy and Simmon, the two complex characters here elaborately analyzedIn chapter four, the writing techniques of the author are dealt with. Lord of the Flies is a text in which everything appears twice, in radically opposed versions of reality, contradictory yet complementary-and this applies not only to its subject matter, its characters, but also to its style, with its competing narratologies of schoolboy slang and narrator's gloss. It mainly consists of two parts: one the high and low languages, the other the multiplying ambivalence application.In conclusion, It is because he has forsaken the world of customary social relationships, the ordinary universe of the quotidian and circumstantial, the recognizable world that we all inhabit, that Golding seems so remote from the mainstream, so alien to the great tradition. His interests lie elsewhere. He wishes to show us what human beings are really like, not in the assigned by society-wives, husbands, love... |
