Allusion And Parody: An Intertextual Interpretation Of Lord Of The Flies

As the Nobel Prize winner of the year 1983, William Golding doubtlessly has captured the attention of numerous critics and scholars. His works are noted for the poetic narration and a profound insight into humanity. In spite of the tremendous critical attention the work has already drawn, there is still a research gap in the field, for we have found studies on Golding and his masterpiece Lord of the Flies seem to be mainly biographical and thematic. The multi-structures within the text of Lord of the Flies and the novel's relationship with other literary texts are understudied, and our understanding of the novel is therefore limited.This thesis attempts to re-read and re-interpret Lord of the Flies in the light of intertextuality, which suggests a synchronic way of re-interpreting the text. It focuses on the interaction between the text's content and form and the inter-references between the text and its intertexts. In addition, the theory of intertextuality aims to liberate the text from the single reading context and re-read it in a multi-cultural context, manifesting the fact that the meaning production of a text is the result of the interplay, interconnectedness and interaction between a text and its related intertexts. Drawing on this theory, the thesis explores the interrelationship between the novel Lord of the Flies and its pre-texts such as English desert island literature, the myths in the Bible, the ancient Greek tragedy and the historical text of primitive society. In particular, the thesis uses the concepts of the"narrow"intertextuality defined by Genette: allusion and parody. The former is a co-present intertextuality, and the latter a derivative intertextuality.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first one is a brief introduction to Golding's life, his literary achievements, and a review of critical studies of Lord of the Flies as well as this thesis's research questions, methodology, significance and structure. Chapter two introduces the theory of intertextuality in terms of its relevance to this study, focusing on the broad intertextuality represented by Roland Barthes and the more workable narrow intertextuality represented by Genette. Chapter three and four is a close reading based on Genette's narrow intertextuality. Chapter three makes use of the concept of allusion to analyze the interrelationship between Lord of the Flies and the Bible, the ancient Greek tragedy, the Bacchae. The fourth chapter employs the concept of parody to demonstrate the interactions between Lord of the Flies and the texts of the classical desert island literature, the historical text of primitive society development as well as the Promethean fire in the Greek mythology so as to explore the multi-themes put in an open context. And the last chapter concludes with a summary pointing out that Lord of the Flies straddles'text of pleasure'and'text of bliss'. The multiple intertexts determine the openness of meaning and the meaning production of a text lies not in trying to find the final and definite meaning but in the dialogues and communications between text and text, text and reader, writer and reader.