An Archetypal Study Of Lord Of The Flies

Mainly in a way of archetypal criticism, this thesis tries to concretely analyzeLord of the Flies written by William Golding which utilizes a good deal of archetypesbased on Greek mythology and Bible. The development of the archetypal criticismhas undergone three stages which represented by Frazer’s anthropology, Jungiananalytical psychology and Frye’s myth-archetypal criticism. According to Frye, themyths are the basic modes of literature which emerge as the archetypes embodied inother modes. Frye holds the opinion that the aim of literary writing is attempting toseek for the human archetype and the analysis of literary works are to explore the richconnotation through the archetypes. The characters, the nature images and thearchetypal processes in the novel are the elements to form the archetypes. Meanwhile,the archetypes are closely connected with each other rather than existing in isolation,which manifests the coherence of theme of the novel and makes the novel valuable.The whole thesis is made up of four chapters. The first chapter is a briefintroduction to William Golding and his work Lord of the Flies firstly. Then thefollowing part introduces the archetypal criticism. Chapter Two studies the archetypalcharacters who are Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon and the nature archetypes whichconsist of Eden, serpent, fire and water in Lord of the Flies. Chapter Three analyzesthe archetypal processes which exposes the natural instincts in the heart. The lastchapter is a summary to the thesis.This thesis is ended with a conclusion. Lord of the Flies is endowed with abundant connotation and profound meaning for it contains plentiful archetypes basedon Greek mythology and Bible, which shows the consideration of humanity and theanxiety of the awkward condition of civilization. It’s excellent to be a case to explorethe archetypes.