On The Growth Interest Between Lord Of The Flies And Catcher In The Rye

Both Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye belong to the initiation novel in a sense. Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys who are marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a future war. As the boys splinter into factions, some behave peacefully and work together to maintain order and achieve common goals—to be saved by the signal fire, while others rebel and seek only anarchy and violence—to hunt boars. As the result of the conflict, the civilized and rational side is defeated by the savage and unconscious side. And Catcher in the Rye narrates a story in which the protagonist Holden Caulfield undergoes escaping from the pretentious adult world. He feels the uncompromising pain with the reality in the initiation. This thesis plans to comparatively analyze the growing processes of the main characters in both Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye in the way of the psychological criticism.The main reason of the growth pains lies in the ego's failure in dealing with the conflicts among the id, the superego and the external world. In the particular situations of the two novels, the ego is crushed by the tough id and the external world lack of power from the superego. By comparison, the thesis attempts to draw a tough picture of initiation problems and, at the same time, to provide a new literary interpretation about the growth theme revealed in these two great works.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter briefly overviews the critics about Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye and introduces the psychological approach and the Mental Personality theory to make clear the method and significance of study the two novels. The second analyzes the main characters'growth and mental personality in the realm of the initiation theme. The third continues the analysis about the main characters'behaviors in the mental phases dominated by the id, the ego and the superego to show the characteristic mental features. The fourth supplies several general initiation problems to illustrate the growing pains of the main characters. The last chapter summarizes the previous chapters with suggesting the way of dealing with the growing pains and points out the flaws existing in the thesis.