Ho
ETHICAL EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE NOVELS OF
WILLIAM GOLDING
Sunit B. Khera
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
December 1969
Approved by Doctoral Committee
BOWLING G"EEfl STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ii J 7/. 77/ 433101 $ dd» ABSTRACT
Believing earnestly that_man's happiness and survival depend^on_his-knowledge of evil, in his novels to date William Golding dramatically presents the potentialities, development and validity of his characters1 understanding— a theme which can be defined under one non-conventional pairing, ethical epistemology. According to the variations on this theme, it is illuminating to pair the six protag onists into three non-chronological groups. The reader must interpret the pragmatic questipn,__of_suryiyal_in.' relation to pre-adolescent Ralph's rational, and childlike ^Neanderthal man Lok’s intuitive understanding of "adult“ evil in the first two novels Lord of the Flies (1954) and The Inheritors (1955).
There is a distinction between the evasive symbols and delusion and the visionary symbols and understanding of the two obsessed men—egocentric and lustful naval officer Christopher and proud, prurient, and pious dean Jocelin—in the third and the fifth novels Pincher Martin (1956) and The Spire (1964). The questions of self-created sufferings and spiritual extinction are inseparably linked with these characters1 ethical being, intelligence and refusal to analyze themselves. The reader’s epistemological role in Free Fall (1959) and The Pyramid (1967) is to get a chronological perspective of the "guilty" and somewhat enlightened narrator protagonists’ flashbacks. Sammy and Oliver examine their individual personalities and environ ment with respect to redemption, guilt and choice.
The greatest achievement of these thought-provoking novels is to present every character's distinct personality and understanding and yet to dramatize certain universal truths about evil and understanding. They enter the field of psychology because of their penetration into the depths of the human mind. S.ince they place man in the context of his^dis.tant ancestors, they become anthropologicaly dramatizing inheritance, environment and survival, they are Darwinian. Emphasis on choice makes thern^somewhat' Christian and existentialistat the same time. Exploring man*s Inhocehce. guilt. redemption, arfd^spiritual survival, they are religious ? in fact ethical epistemology is the religion of Golding1s universe. iii
Contents Page Introduction ...... 1
Ethical Epistemology
Chapter I...... 7
Innocence and Survival Chapter II»Lord of the Flies (1954) .34
ChapterIII The Inheritors (1955). . . 58
Obsession and Spiritual Survival
Chapter IV Pincher Martin (1956). . . 85
Chapter V The Spire (1964). . . . .103
Guilt and Redemption ....
Chapter VI Free Fall (1959). . . • ..121
ChapterVII The Pyramid (1967). . . ..138
Conclusion...... 153
A Selected Bibliography ...... 163 Introduction
Revolving around the theme of understanding man's
"being," particularly his ethical being, William Golding's novels are of great relevance in this age when the clouds of nuclear war menacingly threaten our survival and when we are yearning for happiness perhaps more desperately than did our ancestors, vet except for Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies (which became a best seller in
England and America in 1961—seven years after its publi cation), his other five novels to date are relatively unknown. His second novel The Inheritors, published in
.1955 in England, was not published in America till Lord of the Flies became widely known here. Since 1961, however,
Golding has been more generally recognized. He was invited from England to Hollins College, Virginia, as a writer-in- redidence and to several American colleges and universities the same year for lectures. He has been interviewed by several critics since then; Owen Webster and Frank Kermode were the only ones to have interviewed him before his general recognition.
It is the daring nature of his work that seems to account for this slow recognition; most of his novels are obscure, shocking, pessimistic, or lacking in social conflict, and are often adversely criticized for these reasons. But it 2
has been rarely pointed out that these distinctive qualities
are an inherent part of his vision as an artist and a man.
Golding demands a complete involvement from his reader.
The more one reads Golding the more one becomes convinced
that obscurity is inherent in the subject matter of the
novels and that it is not a compensation for their "obvious"
ethical content. Each reading answers more puzzles, though
there are always more to be unraveled. Exploring the depths
of the protagonists’ being, one finds that Golding is shocking
because he makes one penetrate the truth (which may momentar
ily seem to be exaggerated and unrealistic) about oneself
and about one's fellow man. Promising a ray of hope in
self-analysis, the novels_begln to seem optimistic. The
lack of social conflict in most of these novels emphasizes
the fact that though society Influences individual lives,
salvation of society and of the individual lies more in the
individual's understanding of ethical problems than in
social institutions.
Ethical differences in the personalities of Golding's protagonists are important, two extremes being innocent Lok of The Inheritors and wicked Christopher csf Pincher
Martin? the other protagonists can be placed in an ascending scale of evil between Lok and Christopher: largely innocent
Ralph, guilty Sammy and Oliver, largely wicked Jocelin.
1 Sammy Mountjoy, the narrator protagonist of Golding’s Free Fall classifies the people he knows into four general 3
The degree to which these characters are evil depends on the
extent to which they hurt others and even themselves. I do
not believe I could classify any other major novelist’s
protagonists in this manner. But then Golding himself _
distinguishes between his characters on the basis of the
degree -tO-which- they are -innocent—or-wicked-. He makes
Christopher corrpletely wicked and acknowledges that he
deliberately does so. Replying to a question by Frank Kermode, Golding said that Christopher is "fallen man, ...
Very much fallen—he’s fallen more than most. In fact, I
went out of my way to damn Pincher as much as I could think of."*3 The narrator of a short story "Miss Pulkinhorn"
differentiates between Miss Pulkinhorn and her lovers
"He was a self-deceiver, as successful in his line as Miss
Pulkinhorn, but his deceit had a kind of innocence about it."3
It must be mentioned here that Golding’s view of man’s
nature is not necessarily and rigidly Christian. Though he
uses Christian terminology such as paradise, fall, original
groups: innocent, good, wicked and guilty; guilty people being between the two extremes of innocence and goodness on the one hand and wickedness on the other hand. I am using these categories because I find that the novels bear out that Sammy’s classification is Golding’s. 3 "Meaning of It All." Books and Bookmen. V (Oct. 1959), p. 10. 3 Encounter. XV (August 1960), p. 28. 4
sin and innocence, the ethical framework of his novels goes
beyond Christianity. He never specifies that man's fall
occurred when Adam disobeyed God; nor does he present God
in Christian terms. His view of the origin of evil in roan
seems more like Darwin's emphasis on inheritance and on
individual differences. The damnation of Christopher may
seem Christian, but Christopher's purgatory and sufferings
are not representative of conventional ideas of Christians on these subjects? and Christopher is not punished by a
"Christian God." Golding himself possesses a quality that
he thinks "a writer must have": "an intransigence in the face of accepted belief. If he takes one oX—these for
granted, then he ceases to have any use in socley at all.
He should always be able to say? 'Well, that's all very 4 well for you, but this is the picture as I see it.,M { Golding does not depend on any conventional system of
understanding man'—Christianity or science, for example, but
comes close to them whenever necessary, since his subject
(man) is the same as theirs. Concerned with man and his
problems, Golding takes his vocation as a writer seriously
and in a unique way. He alms to understand his own and
, others' evil and to communicate that knowledge to his readers
in order to help them know themselves. Since wickedness
4 Owen Webster, "Living with Chaos," Books and Art. I (March
1958), p. 16. 5
hurts other people and brings unhappiness, he wants to
diagnose it and to help in controlling it. At an inter
national writers* conference in Leningrad, he saids
I can only tell you, briefly, what it is that makes me write. I have not had any of the terrible personal experiences which other writers have described to us, but I have observed the world—I started to write late—and I have reached certain conclusions. I have always been struck by things which men do to other men. I know of deeds which took place during the war, about which I still cannot think without feeling physically ill. I am becoming--ever more convinced that humanity—the people we .gu^_J&QSjg_ag_meet‘—is suffering—'fxom.a 'ter ribledls ease. I want to~examine~~this_dlsease, because only by knowing it, is there any hope of being, able to control it. And when I look around me, to find exanples of this sickness, I seek it in theZplace where itis most easily accessible to me, I mean in myself. ~ : I n my opinion, therefore, the novelist does not limit. Himself to reporting facts, but diagnoses them, and his vocation has the same value as that ~of the doctor.. TotHose wKo~are_too~Ignorant or too. iazy_to_know themselves, I shall continue to says *LookJ___L.ookl VdokT'S
Being Interested in his readers* knowledge of man's ethicalbelng, Golding explores__his_characters> understanding.
He told Frank Kermode, for example, that Simon in Lord of the Flies is not understood by the boys.® And he told Bernard
Dick that naval officer in the same novel does not know
® “The Condition of the Novel,“ New Left Review (Jan. Feb. 1965), pp. 34-35. & "Meaning of It All," p. 9. 6
7 himself. Consequently, Golding presents the sources,
possibilities, limitations and validity of his: characters•
understanding about man's ethical being—all of which can be defined under one term, ethical epistemology.8 This is why
a non-Conventional pairing of epistemology with ethics
seems indispensable to me in discussing Golding's novels.
"The Novelist is a Displaced Person." College English. XXVI (March 1965), p. 481. 8 Golding points out the importance of individual potential in determining the extent of one's understanding, in the introduction to his play The Brass Butterfly, when he comments on the reasons why Euphrosyne does not know herself and Mamillius does not understand hers "She only uses her intelligence once in the play but she is so frightened by the result she blames it all on God; . . . She is a school girl suffering from an attack of piety. Her religion is touching, perhaps, but funny. On the stage, it should be given a hint of gauche melodrama which Mamillius is too young and enraptured to see through," London, Faber School Edition, p. 3. Chapter I
Ethical epistemology is the nucleus of all of Golding's
novels; Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955),
Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), .
and The Pyramid (1967). The protagonists are placed under
circumstances where they must understand themselves and
others, according to their respective abilities. With great
imagination and inventive skill Golding dramatically presents
the relationships between the six protagonists' personalities
and their epistemological development. It is illuminating,
however, to group these protagonists into three pairs—Lok
and Ralph, Christopher and Jocelin, and Sammy and Oliver—-
in view of their personalities and the trends of their
development.
Lok and Ralph of the first two novels, The Inheritors
and Lord of the Flies. the most innocent and the least
mentally developed protagonists, move from ignorance in the
beginning of the novels to an awakening by the end. (The differences between them are no less striking; Lok is completely innocent and can understand like a child, whereas
Ralph's potential for evil and reasoning are like those of adults).
Christopher and Jocelin of the third and the fifth novels. Pincher Martin and The Spire, the most evil of the 8
six protagonists, go from self-deception to an acceptance
of reality. Their evil obsessions use their disproportion ately developed reason to deceive them. (But Christopher
is the epitome of corruption, whereas Jocelin has some redeeming qualities).
Sammy and Oliver of the fourth and the sixth novels,
Free Fall and The Pyramid, move from a sensuous and
intuitive understanding to some degree of conscious under standing. Neither wholly wicked nor wholly innocent, they are the guilty ones. In their development also they stand between the first two pairs of protagonists« on the one hand, their senses, intuition and reason help them in understanding; on the other hand, their reason, dominated by their evil, deceives them. (Their development is very different, however, from each other and Sammy is primarily interested in understanding himself whereas Oliver is concerned with analyzing himself as well as others almost equally).
Thus the pairings are not based on the chronological sequence in which the novels were published. In fact, the pairs'defy chronology within themselves. In the first pair, Lok,'the protagonist of the second novel, The Inheritors, is the least mentally developed, most innocent, and most ignorant character and not Ralph, the protagonist of the first novel, Lord of the Flies. 9
Lok and Ralph, a primitive man and a pre-adolescent
child, are put into situations where, on confronting the
destructive forces in some of the other characters, they
begin to lose their ignorance. Lok, a member of the gentle
tribe of Neanderthal man, must come in contact with the
Homo Sapiens who are farther along in evolutionary develop
ment and the Homo Sapiens must make him suffer, before he
knows that he is fascinated by them and that he is different
frojp them. Ralph too, one of a group of schoolboys marooned on an island, must see civilization, order, peace, and commonsense disappear largely because of Jack and his group, in order to gain perception into the destroyers8 character and to realize that he has the same potential with the difference that he can to some extent control the propensity toward violence.
In a sense, Lok's mind is like that of Faulkner's Benjy.
Both are innocent and helpless characters who depend on sense experience for knowledge and who react to new situations like children. Both take a photo picture of the world outside them as innocent observers. Benjy cannot communicate through speech, Lok's linguistic resources are limited.
Lok's mind, however, develops eventually toward the state of rational being since he acquires some ability to interpret and discovers that he has been using similes without identi fying the significance of metaphorical language. He realizes that unhappy changes come from contact with the Homo Sapiens. 10
Benjy's "conception" of various aspects of Change is on
a sensuous level alone.
In Lok's extremely ignorant and undeveloped mind,
therefore, the process of understanding must start with the
simplest issues; even the simple is complex for him. Lok
thinks that his people, the Neanderthals, are the only people
on earth; when the Homo Sapiens begin interfering with the
life of the Neanderthals, the first indication being the
sudden disappearance of a log, even the idea that another tribe exists in the world besides his people is new and
incomprehensible to him. After Ha, his tribe’s man of emer gency, disappears, he is made to accept not only the existence of the Homo Sapiens, but to sense their danger to his people.
But when he watches the dead bodies of his mother and Nil, whom they killed, he rationally associates these strange people with brutality, though he still lacks a precise conception of it.
^Ralph’s insight into Jack's group is profound and . grows fast. In the beginning, being ignorant of Jack's potentia1 for evi1, he does not take seriously Jack's defiant and anarchical act of building the first fire whereas Pigorv sees this lack of restraint as the first sign of deteriora tion within the society established by the boys on the island.
But very soon, Ralph realizes that Jack ignores the rules of order because of his ferocity. When Jack goes hunting^ and lets the rescue-fire die, Ralph understands him.fi 11
A contact with the destructive groups enables Lok and
Ralph to see their—own—nabur_e_in relation to that of the destroyers. The only closeness Lok can feel to the Homo
Sapiens is that of a child’s attraction for novelty, and excitement of imitating the strange. Even though the Homo
Sapiens’ fire horrifies him, he feels an impulse to go toward it, and though the Homo Sapiens are frightening like the fire and the river, they draw like honey or meat.
On drinking the Homo Sapiens' mead, he thinks that he has acquired their power, but the reader knows that he is incapable of destroying. Long after seeing these people, he is as innocent as he was before meeting them. Even when the Homo Sapiens shoot a second arrow at him, he uses it as a twig for balance to go across the water. When he watches a stag’s heart being pierced (it is an artificial stag, but Lok does not know this at this point), he does not want to see it. Retaliation remains foreign to his nature. The HomoSapiens have stolen the infant Neanderthal boy, whom the Neanderthals call "the new one." Fa and
Lok want him back. But when they are going to take the baby back, Lok is sad to think that he and Fa are going to cheat the Homo Sapiens. Even the water rat senses that Lok is not dangerous: "The rat concluded from the creature’s stillness that it was not dangerous.
9 William Golding, The Inheritors (New York 1955), p. 220. 12
Unlike Lok, Ralph must grow to view the same destructive
forces within himself as he sees in Jack's group. In the
b eg inning, the reader observes that to a degree he is_more
like Jack than like Piggy. His jokes at Piggy, his wild
particlpation_J,ri_bullding the first fire and his enjoyment
in ro11ing rocks isolate him from Piggy and bring him
,closer to Jack. But Ralph is not keenly aware of his kin-
ship with Jack at this point. *
He must give expression to his violent nature before
he realizes that he has this tendency and that he _must
restrain it. Ironically, while going to hunt what the boys
consider to be a beast, but what in reality is a dead para
chutist, Ralph discovers his own love of hunting. Flinging
a stick at the boar and feeling proud of himself, he acknow
ledges that "hunting was good after all." And when Robert
mocks a pig, and the other boys circle round him, "Ralph,
carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric's
spear and jabbed at Robert with it. 'Kill himl Kill him!•
. . . Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful
of that brown, vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and
hurt was overmastering." But he feels embarrassed: "'Just a game,' said Ralph uneasily."1® Ralph does not hurt Robert,
however. But later he actually takes part in Simonas
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York 1968), p. 136. 13
murder, though the initiative is not his and he repents miserably for it. Kis insight into himself is deep since he realizes what he can do to others and is frightened by his potential for violence.
A conscious appreciation of their friends runs parallel to Ralph and Lok’s awareness of themselves and their enemies. Lok is emotionally close to his people from the beginning, but he feels their importance as a secure group after facing the reality of the Homo Sapiens* existence. He recognizes the significance of Fa’s companionship after watching their cruelty. Ralph starts out by making fun of
Piggy and thinking Simon strange, but on seeing Jack’s brutality, he consciously admires both Simon’s exclusive help in building the shelters and Piggy’s guidance. Again,
Ralph’s understanding is at a rational level and Lok’s at an intuitive one, because Ralph understands why Simon and
Piggy are his friends, though he does not understand
Simon’s vision of fear. Unlike Piggy, Ralph is not complete ly rational, and he has some innate intuitive ability which may have enabled, him to appreciate Simon, the mystic, but the potential is not realized since unlike Piggy,
Simon is modest and does not assert strongly and because Ralph’s intuitive ability is much less..pronounced_than Simon’s.
Whereas intuitive and gentle Lok is powerless against the cruel Homo Sapiens, rational and violent Ralph is very effective against Jack’s brutality. Since he is wild like 14
Jack, he is able to save himself from him. With the stick
on which the pig’s head is hung Ralph stabs two boys of
Jack's hunting party when followed by them. Simon and Piggy
do not share the_fierceness of Jack and are unarmed when
attacked by his group.
Understanding Jack's love of power, he becomes aware
of the need to control him, not only by laying down rules
but by enforcing them? and he is a competent leader as long
as he can assert that leadership. He becomes ineffective
against^Jack in those areas where his understanding is
-l-i-m-- -i-t--e--d- .- He does -n--o--t- - k—-n-o-—w that he -c--a- nn--o--t-- 1-c--o- —nt-r--o--l- --h--i-m-— -f--or a long time without Simon's vision. Jack
exploits Ralph’s fear and gains power. Simon offers the
only sensible solution which would have broken the foun- dations of Ralph’s crippling fear. But Ralph ignores it.
Simon suggests that they should go to See the beast that
frightens the boys. If they had gone they would have found
that it was a dead parachutist and not a beast that they
¿thought hunted them. Though Ralph’s understanding of
S—im- on is ■ ■ • lim■ ite d®-,- --h---i-s- kno"w ledge of~ ~ him1 s1 ■ e: lf. Piggy and Jack is. conscious, rational, profound, complex and clear as compared with Lok’s largely subconscious, completely intui tive, extremely limited, simple and vague understanding of himself and his friends and enemies. 15
Both Lok and Ralph move from ignorance to understanding
on a fairly simple level largely in relation to the theme of violence. By contrast, Christopher of Pincher Martin and
Jocelin of The Spire represent intensely complex epistemo
logical problems because their obsessions compel them to
evade reality about themselves as well as others. At the beginning of the novel, Jocelin's obsession is to build the spire at other people's cost. Naval officer Christopher's desire is to survive under all circumstances. Jocelin's determination to build a spire for his church is an outlet of sexual urges ignored and suppressed in the past, without realizing that a repression would find a strong diverted expression. Christopher's selfishness is the peak of self- love he had developed in his past by using others and by igno ring the truth that he would himself have to suffer for ejjploiting others.
Though unlike Lok and Ralph, Christopher and Jocelin are conscious deluders and obsessed, they too are placed in the kind of circumstances where they are forced to face the truth. Jocelin is an exploiter, yet he has some compassion? hence he begins to.understand when he sees that others are suffering because he is building the spire. Christopher is a destroyer, but he dreads his own destruction? after encountering his physical death in the Atlantic ocean when his war ship is wrecked, he understands his punishment for being wicked. 16
Persistently using their reasoning power to delude
themselves, the two protagonists understand by going through
a constant and painful struggle between delusion and reality.
Christopher tries to believe that he has not died, Jocelin
suppresses his lust for Goody, and rationalizes the misery
he is bringing to others. Christopher knows very clearly
that he has died: he is -certain that his body and "centre"
(the life, consciousness, the soul) are separate. But he
creates delusion, by making a stupendous effort to believe that his body is together with his center; dominated by an
irrevocable desire to live, he uses imagination and intelli
gence to deceive himself into thinking that his body is
functioning normally; he fabricates all the signs of life
in his body: movements, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, and
elimination. He also knows now that his second death-—
that of his “centre"—is near. Fearing this spiritual death,
he makes every effort to convince himself that it cannot
come, by believing that the physical death has not come yet.
This unending tension between what he knows to be true (that he would be completely annihilated)and what he passionately wants to be the reality (that he would live) makes his "centre" suffer intensely. He wants "peace" but cannot have it.11
Jocelin too creates a conflict between reality and
H William Golding, Pincher Martin (London 1964), p. 105. 17
deliberate illusion. He discovers his lust for Goody and he realizes that by building the spire he-is bringing misery to several people and to himself. Hehknows that sexton
Pangall is distressed because of the workers* obscene jokes . and that later he is murdered by them. Pangall’s wife
Goody, in agony because of her adulterous relations with the master builder Roger Mason, dies in child-birth. The fear of heights, constant worry that the spire will fall, and his adulterous involvement with Goody, make Roger suffer. Rachel is in torment on seeing her husband’s relations with Goody.
But Jocelin rationalizes his role in causing these sufferings, by arguing that he is on his Father’s business, that everyone is responsible for his own salvation, that the destructive process is part of the constructive process, and that he and Roger were chosen for the task. And he rationalizes his prurience for Goody, by arguing that she is his "daughter in God." He convinces himself that he wants to protect her from the sin of adultery, though he knows that he has himself promoted the sin,
In spite of his rationalizations Jocelin suffers. One of his principal agonies is that all other persons and conditions seem to conspire against what he thinks is a god-sent vision. Jocelin is in torment from both negative and positive traits in his character, his irrepresible prurience and his sympathy for others’ sufferings. The singing of stones In his head, Goody’s red hair, the red 18
berry and the red mistletoe connected with the time of
Pangall's murder by the workers constantly haunt him. Just
before Goody's death he cries for mercy on seeing his "true
love" suffer and says he did not know building the spire
would bring death. He pathetically wishes that there were "some mode of life where all love is good. "^-2
But Jocelin cannot stop the suffering and the construction
of the spire since he continually attempts to suppress his
lust just as he had repressed it in the past. Christopher
cannot stop his own suffering because he persistently attempts
to believe, as he did in his past, that he would not suffer
the consequences of exploiting others. Christopher had
seen others' suffering vividly: the hatred in his girl
friend Mary's eyes when he had raped her, poignancy in his
producer friend Peter's cry when he had hurt his leg, and
torment in Peter's outburst when he had relations with Peter's
wife Helen. But he did not change himself. '
The two protagonists can and could have controlled their obsessions only by facing reality. Jocelin can stop wounding others and himself by admitting his lust and by stopping the spire? and he could have avoided all the present misery by having acknowledged his lust in the past. Christopher can put an end to a self-created purgatory by accepting the fact that he must die spiritually? and he could have had life 12
12 William Golding, The Spire (New York 1964), p. 206. 19
after death by having admitted that he must control his devouring nature if he wants to live spiritually.
Gradually and painfully, however, they do come to un derstand the root of their problems in their present. For a long time, Jocelin has been interpreting his vision of a spire as an outcome of his pure religious fervour. But he faces the fact that the vision is an expression also of his suppressed sexual zeal. His mind flashes back to the time when he had vicariously married Goody to impotent
Pangall. He remembers that the king, who had improper relations with his Aunt Alison, had used his influence to gain for him fast promotions from a novice to a Dean. He discovers that, in fact, his Aunt is not only a supplier of money for the spire but that she had chosen him for the task of building it.
Christopher has been believing that his greed will not devour him. But he remembers that Peter had tried to help him realize that if he did not stop ’’eating" other people he would be eaten by his own nature. Nathaniel had made an unsuccessful attempt to convince him that if he wanted to live after death he must follow the "technique of dying into heaven." But he had paid no attention either to Peter or to
Nathaniel. Now this recollection becomes poignant.
But the power to Change, if at all, lies with the two men through the time of their obsessions? the earlier they had understood, the more possible it would have been for them 20
to change. The epistemological problem in their situation
is, therefore, paradoxical. Since they are obsessed, they do not understand when their obsessions are at an early
stage. On the other hand, because they do not understand soon, they cannot control the obsessions in time to avoid their consequences. By the time they understand under compulsion, it is too late for them to use their knowledge.
Now they cannot escape the punishment of using others and the consequences of not knowing themselves.
By contrast, Sammy and Oliver, the protagonists of
Free. Fall and The Pyramid, are not such wicked men. Hence, unlike Christopher and Jocelin, they write the story of their past, which shows that to a degree they understand themselves in relation to other people. Their process of conscious comprehension is promoted by certain situations, which are less drastic than is the case with the other four protagonists.. Sammy's profound experience in the dark cell of a German prisom camp, and Oliver's recollec tion of his past during his visit to his music teacher's house, affect them so intensely that in their middle age they analyze themselves.
Sammy begins to confront human nature—his own and that of others, in the context of innocence, evil, and good- through his observation of how fantasy operates in various 21 lives. The most characteristic quality of fantasy as "one of our open secretsits unique suitability to the indi viduality of the fantasist: as Sammy "progressed from person to person the fantasy changed in character but re mained substantially the same in relation to the teller"
(p. 162). He observes that human desires shape into various forms of fantasy, which reveals the individual’s soul; some form of his innocence or guilt. Sammy's childhood friend
Evie’s stories about her rich cousin, about her uncle, the duke, and about her temporary transformation into a boy, are attempts to gain in imagination what she cannot get in reality. His own childhood fantasies are innocent too. He is interested in "secret societies, exploration, detectives,
Sexton Blake." But unlike Evie’s stories, his are "excess of life, not compensation’’ (p. 49).
On the other hand, Sammy’s pre-adolescent guardian
Father Watts-Watt and his theology teacher Miss Rowena
Pringle’s fantasies are not innocent but indicate their spiritual disease. The suppression of sexual desires makes them delude themselves consciously. Watts-Watt satisfies his desires through fantasies and pretends to believe that the acts of his fantasies are known to the other people and that they are accusing him. Suppression of her lust for Watts-Watt makes Miss Pringle imagine an obscene scene in Sammy’s
13 William Golding, Free Fall (London 1964), p. 31. 22
drawing of a landscape at a time when he does not even
understand sex.
Sammy’s fantasies in youth, when sex is overt, are not
innocent any more. But unlike the two adults, they reveal
his desire to express, not suppress, since they are
"religious" people and Sammy is an artist. The repressive adults imagine only sex in their fantasies. The young artist and articulate Sammy sees spiritual in his sexual compulsions; but he deludes himself when he convinces himself at the same time that his motives are only spiritual.
Besides comprehending fantasies as expressive of different people’s desires, Sammy also understands the consequences of being innocent and guilty. A girl’s fantasies expressed before a child bring no trouble; Sammy only feels small on hearing his friend Evie’s non-destructive fantasies, but being innocent he does not hurt Evie. On the other hand, uncorrupt Sammy’s childhood fantasies expressed before a corrupt person Philip are exploited; Sammy is flattered when Philip listens to his stories, but he does not realize that Philip pretends to believe. Sammy knows now that by giving in to Philip’s flattery he had become "clay" in his hands. However, Philip cannot make Sammy do the same degree of evil that he wants him to do; Sammy cannot urinate on the altar, but can only go as far as spitting on it with his dry mouth and feels extremely miserable in doing it.
A guilty fantasist either tortures himself or brings both happiness and sorrow to himself and to others. Watts-Watt 23
pretends that others are accusing him of committing the acts
of his fantasies? this delusion becomes a protracted mania
with him so that he writhes, groans, and miserably controls
his homosexual advances towards Sammy. But Sammy's relation
with Beatrice is both happy and unhappy. He uses Beatrice's
weak point to Seduce her; by cleverly pretending that he
would go mad if she does not respond to him he succeeds.
But he fulfills Beatrice by satisfying something not only
within himself but also within her/ in his middle age now,
Sammy realizes the possiblity that he saved her temporarily from insanity. However, his and Beatrice's relationship is
only partially happy. And when the attraction wears off, he cannot go back to her, though he feels guilty. He is
capable of establishing mutually responsive relations with
Taffy, which he cannot do with Beatrice.
Sammy is better than Watts-Watt since he expresses himself but worse than him since he is responsible for
Beatrice's insanity to a great degree; whereas Watts-Watt does not torture others. Miss Pringle makes Sammy suffer? so she is somewhat like Sammy who makes Beatrice suffer. Since he lives with Watts-Watt she is jealous of him and invents means of torturing him. Like Sammy she understands the importance of Moses and the story about the burning bush in the old Testament, but she knowingly mortifies him in the class by insisting that he is bringing up a silly idea.
By imagining that his drawing is obscene, she makes him 24
go through a cross-examination by the headmaster, the loss of
his valuable drawing, and the humiliation of being secluded
from his class-mates. She does not change in her character
even later when Sammy in his thirtees goes to visit her.
Besides understanding both innocent and guilty people, who are like him in one way or the other, Sammy understands three characters who are embodiments of goodnesss the little black girl in the hospital, Johnny and Nick Shales. The
little girl's goodness radiates from her and fills everybody with joy. Johnny does not become evil in childhood or in youth. Nick is kind, happy and untroubled by sex.
Though Sammy understands himself in relation to several characters, he does not find the answer to one important question he wants to know. He says that he is writing his story because he wants to know when and how he lost his freedom? he does state clearly that he lost it when he made the conscious choice of seducing Beatrice? there was no possibility of his going back to innocence after he made that decision. He does not analyze the process by which he gradually lost his freedom. In fact, while writing his story he thinks that he sees "gaps" between the various stages of his development instead of an obvious connection.
He says that he cannot understand how the gentle Sammy of childhood could change to the present Sammy, who is troubled by his "consciousness." However, he hopes to know more when he finishes writing his story and when he has the 25
opportunity of reading it straight through. The reader is in this position already? after putting together Sammy's estimate of himself and others, one observes the paradoxical process by which Sammy lost his freedom, the way his free fall occurred.
To some extent, his fall is pre-determined? since he is inherently "guilty," he can fall. But he is not like
Philip who is born fallen, wicked inherently. Sammy's evil potential is exploited by Philip. In youth, when sexual desires seek expression, his teachers Miss Manning and Mr Carew, who carry on an open adulterous affair, become his ideals. Both Nick and his headmaster, who can not understand the consequences of their advice (Nick because he is too good to understand evil in others and the head master because he is too irresponsible to visualize the effects of his advice), play their role in Sammy's loss of freedom, by advising him to get whatever he wants at the cost of everything. At this point Sammy consciously decides to seduce Beatrice. Thus his environment promotes his inherent tendencies towards evil instead of controlling them. Nothing happens or is done by adults to enhance the inherent potential for goodness. Sammy shows again and again that all the adults he knows fail to understand the importance of their respon sibility in relation to children and young people, and hence are incapable of helping them. Sammy's school teacher 26
Miss Massey does not understand Johnny's innocent fantasies and punishes his absent-mindedness in her class. On the other hand, Sammy's headmaster and Watts-Watt do not perceive
Philip's evil role in Sammy's life? they let him go scot free and punish Sammy instead. They do not see that a child can wish Sammy to rob.fag cards from little boys and can want him to defile the altar. They think that only an adult can be wicked. Miss Curtis, the art teacher, knows that Sammy makes the drawings for Philip but she acts as if they are made by Philip. Sammy's teachers—Miss Manning and.Mr Carew—present the kind of ideal that appeals to his new sexual desires.
Guilty Miss Pringle and good Nick, who can clearly help Sammy, do not do so. Sammy knows that Miss Pringle is like him in some ways and that hence she understands both the evil and the love of the spiritual in him. But she is too obsessed with her suppression of love for Father Watts-Watt to communicate with Sammy. There is a possibility that
Nick can influence Sammy's life if he understands him. Since
Sammy respects Nick for his selflessness, happiness, good ness and kindness?he makes an attempt to communicate with Nick in order to understand his own sexual desires. But
Nick does not know what it feels like to be a Sammy? hence he briefly dismisses the subject by saying that sex is a disease. 27
Oliver, the protagonist of the last novel to date, The
Pyramid. goes further than Sammy in the scope of his under
standing. By presenting three major characters—himself,
Mss Dawlish and Evie Babbacombe—from three levels of the
social pyramid, in relation to their own social class and
in relation to their parents particularly, in shaping the
lives of children.
The three levels of social structure in Stilbourne,
Oliver’s home town, are: the Ewanses and the Dawlishes on
the highest level, Oliver's parents and the other members of
the Stilbourne Opera Society in the middle, and the Babba-
combes at the lowest level. Appropriately, Oliver’s parents
from the middle class gossip about the higher, the lower and their own class.
Oliver observes that one class repeats the patterns of behaviour of another class from which it keeps itself distant. People from all the three social classes are acutely aware of their own status. The Ewanses and the
Dawlishes stay aloof from the middle class? the middle class looks down upon the Babba combesr? for them Babbacombes' friendliness is foolish and their existence is a disease.
The young people from these classes have the same attitudes as their parents. Robert Ewans, Dr. Ewans‘s son, asserts his social superiority over Oliver both in childhood and in youth. And Oliver himself asserts his status over Evie
Babbacombe. 28
The adults from the two lower classes have accepted
their status in society or try to rise above it through
their children, Oliver’s parents by insisting that he be rich and Evie’s by hoping that she marries Oliver. Their children protest against the differences. Oliver and Evie try to rise above their respective class? Oliver by making fun of Robert and by hurting him by cheating in fights.
He feels that he can prove himself to be as good as Robert by possessing Evie exclusively though Robert has had relations with her earlier. Evie wants Oliver to have her where his parents will see them together. In order to ruin his reputation she tells a lie in reporting that he had raped her.
Robert and Oliver break the class barriers temporarily in order to have sexual relations with Evie. However, the two young men are incapable of getting out of their class structure because they keep the norms of this structure even while seducing her? both boys try to keep their relations with her secret from their parents, never intend to marry her and look down upon her as mere object of their lust. Oliver is not only aware of the role of class differences in his own, Evie and Robert's lives but also of the role of parental possessiveness in the lives of children. Babbacombe, the town crier, has incestuous relations with Evie. Hence he is responsible for her promiscuity? he makes his best effort to see that she goes with no other man. Nevertheless, she has relations with Robert, Oliver, Dr. Jones in Stilbourne 29
and continues to be promiscuous after leaving the town.
On the other end of the social pyramid, Mr Dawlish, a frustrated musician, does not possess his daughter but is responsible for her remaining unmarried. When he fails as a musician, he seeks fulfilment of his ambition through his daughter, by making her a "devoted" musician. Therefore, he is responsible for her suppression of sexual desires, which find expression in numerous ways. Oliver traces in detail the changes in such abnormal expressions throughout her life. She is manly, lethargic, somewhat cruel and indifferent when Oliver, as a child, sees her first. After meeting Henry, she becomes feminine, excited, kind, and happy for a short time. But when Henry’s wife comes to live with her, petty quarrels begin. When she fails to get attention from
Henry by getting her scooter stuck, she walks naked into the town, spends some time in the asylum, and finally, lives on her silly "love" of pets.
Oliver’s parents are possessive like Miss Dawlish’s father, though in a different way. They do not allow him to be a musician, whereas Mr Dawlish forces his daughter to be one? they compel him to go to Oxford and study
Chemistry in order to make money. It is significant that
Oliver observes that the three children—Evie, himself and
Miss Dawlish—all try to get out of the parental possessive- mess in their own way, but the strings pull them back invisibly. Evie’s promiscuity, Oliver’s seduction of Evie, and Miss 30
Dawlish's interest in Henry are their unsuccessful
attempts to escape. Oliver is thus aware of the role
of adults in their children’s lives. Kis understanding
reaches a significant point where the possibility is
that he will not suppress his daughter Sophy’s desire to
be a woman when she grows up.
Thus in presenting the epistemological development
of his six protagonists, Golding creates clrcumstances
where their process of understanding must begin. The
situations and the degree to which they know are very
appropriate to the protagonists’ previous state of know
ledge, their intellectual capabilities and to their
ethical being. Childlike gentle and mentally undevelop
ed man Lok, who is completely ignorant, begins to only
vaguely understand the Homo Sapiens’ violence after some members of his family are killed by them. Since there
is a tremendous difference between his own innocence and the Homo Sapiens' wickedness, his undeveloped reason cannot understand either precisely. ^Pre-adolescent,
innocent and ignorant Ralph, with a potential for adult-like intellectual and ethical change, begins to ------—————■ ■ — — — ““ • •. 1 - 1 comprehend Jack’s ferocity even on seeing his love of hunting at the expense of peace and order and his own love of violence even before he joins Jack and other boys in murdering Simon^ His own death and mental torture 31
initiate deluded and selfish Christopher's and others* suffering
starts humane and wicked Jocelin's process of understanding.
Their reason plays into the hands of their respective obse
ssions to continue to delude them so that they acknowledge
their wickedness with difficulty and Jocelin takes a long
time to appreciate others' humanity, whereas Christopher does
not even recognize it. Sammy and Oliver, whose state of
knowledge is in neither extreme (ignorance or delusion),
since they have intuitively and sometimes even clearly
understood most of their past, understand under comparatively
less painful situations? artist Sammy when he is denied
light by being thrown into a dark cell and normal Oliver
when he visits an important place of childhood experiences.
These two men understand both themselves and others in a
significant way.
There is___not only a relation between the epistemological
equipment of the protagonists and the degree to which they
understand, but also between their understanding and their
ability to use that understanding to control evil and avoid
suffering. Since Lok does not understand evil in others «► •— ------■ . — clearly, he cannot control it? hence the Homo Sapiens
make his family suffer and even wipe the Neanderthals out of existence.. Since Christopher and Jocelin do not compre
hend evil within themselves soon enough, they suffer, cause
suffering to others, cannot control their own evil and
cannot learn from others' advice. (Ralph understands 32
violence and fear himself and in the other boys. He realizes
that the consequences of brutality are disastrous at the
time when this understanding helps him control himself and
the boys. To the degree that he does not understand his and other hoys* fear, he fails in controlling them.\ While
writing his story Sammy quite clearly perceives the role
of one’s own individual personality and that of adults in promoting evil. He finds self-analysis redeeming in itself.
There is an indication that he might use his knowledge more
effectively after reading his story connectedly and after
understanding how he lost his freedom. Oliver knows quite vividly that the adults* of all social classes hand down
their own natures to their children, that they mould their children’s lives their own way and that they are basically alike though they like to emphasize differences more than similarities. Hence there is a possibility that he will be responsible in relation to his children? he notices his son Mark’s innocent destructiveness and his potential? he consciously decides that he will not interfere with his daughter’s desire to be a fulfilled woman.
Golding’s ideal epistemological hero would be neither totally innocent like Lok, nor totally evil like Christopher, nor predominantly wicked like Jocelin. His mind would be neither undeveloped like Lok’s nor disproportionately developed like Christopher’s and Jocelin’s. This ideal epistemological person would be quite like Ralph, Sammy 33
and Olivfir, but would have their better qualities in a greater degree, and the worse ones In a smaller degree, i. e., he would be largely uncorrupt and would have an appropriately developed reason. Like Ralph, this ideal hero would be able to understand the evil and the good in others at a time when he _can actually promote good and can control wickedness.
Like Sammy, he would consciously try to understand himself and would be aware of his own limitations in understanding? he would realize that adults can, to some extent, control evil in younger people. Like Oliver, he would consciously understand other people, would see that fundamentally human nature is the same though every person differs and would realize that one hands down one’s own evil nature to younger people and usually moulds their lives into evil. Chapter II
In Lord of the Flies Golding places the protagonist
Ralph in circumstances where he must see that the twin evils of violence and fear cause suffering and destruction.
Marooned on a Pacific island along with other pre-adolescent
English boys and elected as the leader of the group, Ralph faces the immediate problem of considering the possibilities of rescue from the island and eventually of coping with the twin evils within himself and in the other boys (all except
Simon), till help or rescue comes.
In order to avoid the consequences of the two evils, he must first see savageness in the personalities of Jack,
Piggy and himself and must see good in Simon's personality.
Second, he must also comprehend the sources, possibilities, limitations, and validity of his own and of Piggy and Simon's knowledge of violence and fear.
The reader understands both Piggy and Simon better__than_
Ralph understands them since Golding uses the point of view in such a way that the reader is bound tfr see more. In_ the first place, the reader has the advantage of being present where Ralph is not? for instance, the reader watches^what happens when Simon is in his place of meditation?
Ralph -only knows that Simon goes somewhere. Second, as an outsider he has the benefit of comparing Ralph's personality
35
and understanding with those of Piggy and Simon and of
seeing the development of the personalities and visions of C —■■ . -- !------■------—■■■■— these characters.
The ethical personalities of Piggy and Simon are stri-
kingly different. In the beginning of the novel, Piggy is
good because wickedness lies dormant under the control of
his reason, but later his fear and violent nature find
expression when his restraint is somewhat broken through,
Simon, on the other hand, has transcended corrupt nature.
Piggy and Simon’s natures are symbolized in their "decorous
smile" and "glowing face" respectively.
„Piggy, the rational member of the group, represents a static and already completed epistemological state,
whereas Simon’s intuitive power is a dynamic, developing
awareness. The two boys’ deaths represent the difference
between the intellectualand spiritual sources of their
understanding. When the red rock strikes Piggy a glancing
blow, hbod flows only from his head? Simon's body is pierced by the spears of the boys, and the stains of his body—
his entire body—spread inch by inch on the pale beach.
Thus Piggy’s vision comes from the head, the only living part of his be_jng whereas Simon's issued from his entire mental and ethical being. ~ ^The differences in their personalities determine the respective possibilities, limitations, and potential changes
in Piggy and Simon's levels of understanding. In the 36
beginning of the novel Piggy unconsciously understands the
importance of exercising control and of maintaining order.
But his vision remains limited since he does not realize
the significance of facing his own violent nature and his
own fear of the unknown evil. On the other hand, Simon
understands gradually both violence and fear but his vision
enlarges.
Piggy’s reason and self-restraint^enable him to observe
the outward manifestations of violence^more vividly than any other character in the novel. He is the first one to watch the consequences of wildness in nature and in the boys? he sees the airplane cockpit burn and knows that there are no adult survivors» he notices first that the boy with a mulberry mark is missing as a result of the first wild fire; he is the first to find that there is no smoke on the mountain and that the fire is extinguished since Jack has taken the boys away for hunting; £ater, he sees the boys stealing off to Jack’s feast.
Besides being keenly observan tof theconsequences of
^savageness, be considers ways of inposlnq restraint on the boys_. jjrhe rules for building a civiliz.ed_community on the island mainly stem from Piggy’s—bra-i-n-s—He-ta'lks'about holding a meeting, using the conch as a sign of civiliza tion (based on authority) and about building shelters.
Further, he intends to restrain the boys by his vehement rebukes and admonitions. For instance, he "scornfully" 37 protests against the boys' "senseless ebullience" in building the first fire and points out • "with bitter realism" that the first fire is too big to be kept, and later, snubs Jack for neglecting it.
But Piggy’s understanding of violence is limited to hisseelng it in the other boys? he tries not to acknowledge his own tendencies towards it. If his rationality helps him in understanding others, his rationalization prevents him from understanding himself, there being a very thin line between rationality and rationalization. When Simon says that the boys themselves might be the beast, Piggy is
"shocked out-of-decorum11 (p. 193). He defends the boys who have gone to join Jack’s feast by arguing that they went
"just for some meat" and blushes while suggesting that
Ralph and he join the party for a trumped-up reason: "•I mean
—to make sure nothing happens'" (p. 177). He does not even face upto overt violence within himself. After parti cipating in Simon's murder, he argues that it is useless to talk about it, and tries to justify it by putting the blame elsewhere. He says that Simon asked for it by crawling like a beast within the circle of boys, and that, "bloody" dance, darkness, thunder, rain, and fear made the boys comtoit it. He does not even momentarily admit that something within him (his love of violence) was a jEactor,.,
He insists that Ralph and he forget about it, feigns that he was outside the circle, and decides to pretend before the 38
twins that he was not there. He does not realize that
by this evasion he is restraining his vision.
Simon's insight is not obscured by rationalization. He
does not take pride in his ethica1 superiority; though he
does not commit any act of violence, he even includes
himself when he calls the boys beasts. Therefore, he under-
stands that savage nature, to a greater or a smaller degree.
is part of human nature. Being neither rational nor corrupt,
he is free from Piggy's rationalization of his own violence
and fear. On the other hand, his intuition and freedom
from sin enable him to understand evil fully, though not
rationally.
Horror of evil dawns on him in different visions—first
when he sees Hack returning with the head of a pig. Like
Piggy, though diffidently, he too tri es to help in hib own way by telling the boys that they might be the beast. Later, when he watches from his mat another pig's_h.ead offered as a
sacrifice to the imagined beast the boys are afraid of, _he understands more ramifications,of the boys* violent and unregen era te nature. Though the pig's head—Lord of the Flies —- speaks like the boys and like Simon, it symbolizes Simon's understanding of violence in the boys, It is in fact Simon speaking to himself, projecting his own insight of others into the head.J The ha If-shut eyes of the head "dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life," assuring Simon that
"everything was a bad business" (p. 164), represent Simon's 39
"adult" insight? he knows that all the.boys Including Ralph and Piggy will kill him if he tries to1’ tell them the truth; he imagines the wickedness in the boys saying to him:
"•We are going to have fun on this islandl So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else—. . . —or else!* said the Lord of the Flies, 'we shall do you. See? Jack and
Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph.
Do you. See?'" (p. 172). Also, the head's speech represents
Simon's momentary conflict about whether he should try to help the boys even when he knows that he would not be able to eliminate violence and would be killed instead.^
Since Simon understands brutality in its larger context, he intuitively perceives Piggy's importance as a force against it. He is the only one who-cooperates with Ralph in putting Piggy's idea about shelters into practice. He defends
Piggy against Jack's aggressive gestures in his own shy way and without arousing Jack's anger. When Jack snubs Piggy for not helping in building the fire, Simon points out that
Piggy contributed his share too since his glasses were used
H. S. Babb, "Four Passages from William Golding's Fiction," Minnesota Review. V (1965), p. 51, also believes that "all the things that the head says so 'silently' represent" "the thoughts of Simon." But whereas Babb believes that the scene can be read "realistically, as the plausible experience of a terrified boy," I think that Simon's projection of his thoughts into the pig's head shows his revelatory vision, just as Ralph's later projection of himself into the same pig's head, in the form of a skull, shows his distinct vision.
BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 40
to light the fire. When Piggy is impatient with Jack for letting
the fire go, Simon cautions him: Simon "shushed him
quickly as though he had spoken too loudly in church" (p. 78$.
Piggy continues reprimanding Jack and gets one of the lenses
of his glasses broken. But Simon is the one who picks up
the helf-broken glasses for him. When Jack tortures Piggy
over a piece of meat, Simon shoves his own piece over to
him.
Simon's understanding of fear is also much profounder
than Piggy's. Unlike the other boys, Simon is not afraid
of the dark, the unknown and the mysterious? he can face it.
Bill cannot believe that anybody would want to go all by
himself in the dark to help Piggy? but Simon offers to go.
He goes to his mat in the dark, which is incomprehensible
to the boys. The open space (the place of his meditation)
is "walled with dark aromatic bushes," representing the
unknown whose fragrance he wants to pursue, and later he discovers that the mysterious ironically smells foul.
When he climbs the mountain to find out what the unknown beast is, that the boys are frightened of, he finds that it is a harmless dead body of a parachutist which "breathed foully at him" (p. 175). He had said earlier that he did not believe in the boys' description of a beast that hunts them, and he was right.
By realizing that the unknown beast is harmless, Simon finds a remedy for the boys' fear since one major cause of 41
it is their unfamiliarity with the remote and the unknown.
The "littluns" suffer "untold terrors in the dark" "under
the remote stars" (pp. 66, 104, 109,110). Darkness is
"full of the awful unknown and menace” for the boys
(p. 116). Hence if that unknownbecomes known, the fear is bound to lessen if not to disappear.
Thus Simon faces the unknown consciously. On the other oh——an d' , —-t--h--o--u-g--h-- --P--i-g- "—g—y —is af“ rai■ d of ' the i....ma...... gin-e ■ d beas-t-,- —h —e— d—o —es not acknowledge the unknown. Like the other boys who
"ignored the miraculous throbbing stars," Piggy "discounted" the mysterious "learnedly" as a "mirage" (p. 65). He can, theref ore, nelth.er_-see_the_unknown—caus^-of f ear hims elf - nor can he understand Simon's vision. When Simon suggests that the boys should go to the mountain and see for themselves what the beast is. Piggy responds with an "expression of derisive incomprehension" (p. 153). And when Ralph worries about Simon's having gone to the mountain, Piggy calls
Simon "cracked."
Piggy's understanding of fear is limited to acknowledging his own fright of Jack's aggressiveness? there is no such thing as fear, he says, unless one is afraid of people (p. 97).
Moreover, he does not understand Jack fully because he is so frightened of him. He "suns" in his "expanding liberty" when most of the boys are gone with Jack as their leader
(p. 155). He does not realize the consequences of Jack's leadership and thinks that Jack would let them alone and 42
forgets that a large group is needed to keep up smoke from
. fire for rescue. .
Since. Piggy's personality limits the scope of his
fnsight, his understanding does not increase. Piggy, who
had emphasized the importance of doing “something" in the
beginning (p. 12) later refuses to do "something" when
Simon suggests that action is necessary (p. 153). Piggy,
who had insisted on the importance of building shelters,
leaves them and takes refuge in Jack's "unsheltered"group. This limitation in his vision is symbolized by his
glasses. He is near-sighted but is only aware of the defect
literally. But he is completely unaware of the gradual
inefficacy of his short-sighted vision on the metaphorical
level. He does not see that the strength of Jack's violence
cannot be counteracted unless: he understands Simon's vision
of fear also. Thereforewhen one lens of his spectacles
is broken and when his glasses are robbed by Jack, he is not
worried about them first but thinks that the conch is broken, not realizing that he cannot even contribute to preservlngthe conch—-the shining and fragile beauty of
civilization built on the surface, foundations of restraint from outside~if he does not widen his vision? hence the breaking of his glasses symbolizes Jack's effectiveness in counteracting the positive force of Piggy's limited insight«,
The conch explodes into a thousand white fragments and ceases to exist with Piggy's death, but he loses his glasses first 43
Unlike Piggy's static insight, Simon's understanding of
fear and violence increases through the novel. The open
space within which his mat is located is symbolic of the
light he is searching for. And the butterflies in the middle
of this open space, dancing their “unending dance" are
Simon's constant effort to arrive at the "centre" of things—
to understand man's soul; they continue to dance even when
they witness the boys' violence to the sow; similarly Simon does not stop his attempts to understand evil though he ees the boys' brutal acts to the pigs„15
This unending effort to know helps Simon grow from an understanding of good to that of evil. His path to the mat represents both good and evil; his way is through fruit trees, flowers, bees and through the scar and the darkness before he can reach the light of the open space and then the
"centre" of his mat. Before the boys' evil starts breaking up their society, saintly Simon enjoys beauty, which is pot^the privilege of the wicked; the candle buds open
"their wide white flowers," glimmering under the light of the stars and their scent spills out and takes "possession" of the island (p. 64).
15 For details on this symbol, see p. 13. For another interpretation of the butterflies see Robert J. White, "Butterfly and Beast in Lord of the Flies." Modern Fiction Studies. X (Summer 1964), 163-170. White believes that Golding has "employed the butterflies to symbolize the spiritual side of man's nature. The soul' immortality is clear from the butterflies' 'unending dance,'" (p. 164). 44
Though the darkness of the others is "strange" for him,
he must face it. Along with the refreshing experience of
beauty, whiteness, and fragrance, "darkness poured out,
submerging the ways between the trees till they were dim and strange as the bottom of the sea" (p. 64). Later when
the darkness in the boys' world spreads out, he must see bitter truths, and the sun—the light, the truth"-must shine harshly on him. He must bear thirst and continue to sit? he must kneel down and the "arrow of the sun" must fall on himf he must shift "restlessly but there was no avoiding the sun" (pp. 158-159). At this point he watches the brutal killing of the sow and understands evil more than before:
"Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread" (p. 172). And he understands his own dreadful fate premonltorily when, he loses consciousness in the mouth of this darkness (p. 172).
(Indeed he is later swallowed by the circle of the boys).
Soon Simon, whose moments in the mat had begun with the fragrance of the candle buds, is faced with the foul smell of the parachutist's dead body. Thus unlike Piggy, he realizes that evil exists not only in the boys but also in
difficult to understand as it is all-inclusive and strikes at the foundation of wickedness. He i§ not understood by anybody (only Ralph recognizes Simon's goodness but not his vision). He is, therefore, the first one to die, and at the hands of all the boys including Piggy and Ralph. The boys quickly annihilate their best epistemological resource first. Piggy's vision, though indispensable, is easier to comprehend as it is limited and simple, and strikes only at the-Snrfa.ee - ■ ■------—------. of the■ problem.u Conse—-q- —u e— ntly he is- ■ unde' rsto~ od~ not_o.nly by Simon but also by Ralph. The events are moulded in such a way that neither of the two boys, who values his epistemo- *. ■—■------—'------— - logical strength, participates in his murder. The irony is that the majority of the boys, who are themselves beasts, associate Piggy and Simon with beasts. Piggy is compared to a pig and Simon is mistaken by Phil for a beast that frightens the boys. Both are killed mercilessly like an animal. It is ironical too that the evil boys kill the good Simon, whereas the evil flies had left him alone. The flies had stuck to the dead parachutist and to the obscene pig's head, but they had recognized Simon as living and were not even attracted by his blood. . It is significant that even Jack sees that Piggy's vision is understood by Ralph and that hence Piggy is a threat to the satisfaction of his love of power and violence. But he shows no awareness of Simon's insight as it is not under stood and put into practice by Ralph, and hence poses no practical threat to his love of power and violence. Conse quently, Jack hates Piggy and not Simon. 46 The boys know less than the flies and kill the spiritually living Simon, instead of leaving him alone. However, the_two___epis_teinoloqical sources of the boys on the island remain true to their respective insights— even at the cost of their own lives. Piggy dies telling Jack’s group that instead of behaving "like a crowd of kids" and instead of killing and hunting, they should obey rules and be sensible (pp. 215-216). Simon dies informing the boys that the beast they are frightened of is "harmless and horrible." "Even" the butterflies which symbolize Simon’s search for understanding leave the open space when they are faced with brutality in the Lord of the Flies, but Simon gets into the "mouth of the new circle" of boys’ savageness though he knows that his death is imminent. By contrast, Ralph survives though he also remains true to what he understands. First, because uniike_Biggy_and_ Simon he avoids danger to his own life. As soon as he realizes that Jack's group would kill him like Piggy, he runs away from it. He cautiously finds out from the twins about Jack's plan to hunt him; Piggy and Simon embrace the dangers at the most critical-moments. Second, unlike Piggy and Simon, Ralph is physically strong; Piggy is fat and asthmatic and Simon is frail and fainting, whereas Ralph has boxer's shoulders. Both Piggy and Simon realize this. WhenJlaiph decides to give jup leadership because the assembly breaks down, Piggy and Simon want Ralph to continue because he is 47 the only match for Jack: ‘"He can't hurt you: but if you stand out of the way he'd hurt the next thing. And that's me.' 'Piggy's right, Ralph. There's you and Jack. Go on being chief'" (p. 109). Third, though Ralph is not a "devil" like Jack, he is scheming and pragmatic enough to use Jack's ways to fight against him. When he is hunted by Jack's group, he resourcefully uses the stick on which the pig's head was hung to stab two boys who try to kill him. Fourth^—hg—survives also because he is most anxious to get back to England. It is important that both times he is the —■Wit . first to see the means of rescue.j Simon had understood this intuitively and had prophesied that Ralph would get back to England. ^However, on being elected as the leader of the group, Ralph is not only faced with the problem of his own survival, but also of seeking means by which the boys might survive. And very soon he realizes that they can live only if the twin evils of violence and fear are controlled within himself and in the other boys. His success in this aim depends on his understanding of his own and of Piggy and Simon's insights, ¿piggy's understanding is essential for creating order initially on the island amongst the boys scattered from the crashed plane. In fact, Piggy plays a remarkable role in Ralph's being elected a leader. Though Jack is the more "obvious" leader, Ralph is elected by the boys as he has the conch. Ralph understands Piggy's wise suggestion of 48 using the conch as a symbol of authority to organize the boys for a meeting. It is significant’that he is the first to see and recognize the conch whereas Piggy thinks that it is a stone. On the other hand, it is Piggy who realizes that Ralph can use it whereas he himself cannot blow because of his asthma. Ralph cannot use it without Piggy's instructions on how to blow it. Whereas Ralph has the ability to --l-e-—a—d——, --P--i-g--g-- y -h as th...e insight to see that Ralph can --l--e-a--d- , if he uses his authority as a leader.. Soon Ralph's understanding grows. He realizes the importance of Piggy. In the second meeting he thinks: "Piggy was sitting near but was giving no help" (p. 34). And he comes up with a Piggy-like idea that the conch should also be used as a symbol of order, that only a boy with the conch in his hand can speak in the assembly. Though Ralph becomes a leader and follows Piggy's under standing of establishing order, he cannot know it entirely at once since his own personality is different from Piggy's and the circumstances do not compel him to appreciate it fully yet. Unlike Piggy, Ralph is full of physical energy and loves fun like Jack. His exhuberance finds expression first in non-destructive ways, like standing on his head and enjoying the "violent pleasure" of making "stupendous noise" while blowing the ocean. Jack too wants to have fun on the island. Realizing his kinship with Jack, Ralph exchanges a smile 49 of "shy liking" with him. Both agree that there should be hunters on the island. Both enjoy pushing rocks. Both like to tease Piggy from the first meeting on. They are different from Simon also because they love fun. They excitedly describe the struggling piglet whereas Simon comments only on the pig’s breaking away from the creepers in which it was caught. While describing the things on the island, they mention the rocks? Simon remembers the blue flowers, t . .... Piggy’s vision about wildness is not fully recognized, since Ralph has less reason than Piggy for some time. To the degree that he does not understand Piggy in the beginning, he does not control wildness, and rather remains a party to it. |Soon after the election Jack mentions that he is going to see whether the place is an island or not, and Ralph instantly decides to go with Jack to determine this whereas Piggy wants to do "the first things first"—he would like Ralph to take all the boys’ names down so that they would know how many there are on the island. Consequently, some of the "littluns" who scatter towards the sea disappear into it. Again, without planning and forethought, Ralph suddenly decides that a fire should be built to create smoke for rescue. Jack takes the initiative and gets the boys to follow him. And Ralph has to join the group. The fire built is too big to be kept and the mulberry mark boy becomes a victim to it. Piggy immediately sees this as a sign of 50 deterioration and points out that shelters should have been built first. After learning that the mulberry mark boy has become a victim of the fire (p. 99), Ralph does try to put first things first? he starts building shelters though Simon is the only one who helps him consistently. When the first fire for rescue is extinguished because Jack takes the boys hunting and when the opportunity to be rescued is thus lost, Ralph rebukes Jack vehemently a-nd. . and using his authority as leader, he makes him build another firej thus substituting the second fire, that of authority, in place of the first, which is a para doxical symbol of wildness and savagery and of rescue and togetherness. (Before losing the opportunity for rescue Ralph complains to Jack about not getting any help in buil ding the shelters and wants Jack to help in future. But he does not make Jack submit to his own authority as he does at this time while making fire). Now his "new mood of comprehension” begins. For the first time,/he begins to separate his and others * violent nature and sensible side by^announcing that the next meeting must not be for fun but for business and for putting “things straight.” For a detailed and different treatment of fire as a Symbol see Bruce A. Rosenberg, "Lord of Fire-Flies," Centennial Review. XI (Winter 1967), pp. 128-139. Rosenberg believes that the fires in the'novel are "sacred and profane at the same time" (p. 138). He argues that fire in the novel is "truly an organic symbol. ... For neither the conch nor the pig’s head serve as an element of structure? neither gives the story unity" (p. 138)4 51 He lays down rules for filling water shells, making shelters, using the lavatory and keeping fire. He vehemently criticizes his and others’ irresponsible actions: "We nearly set the whole island on fire. And we waste time rolling rocks, and making cooking fires" (p. 93). At this point, in fact, Piggy is speaking through Ralph. Ironically, exactly at the point when Ralph understands the value of Piggy’s vision fully as he has developed his rea_son, he needs to go beyond this insight to understanding Simon’s about fear, by using his intuition. [After laying down the rules to be followed by the boys, he wants to resolve the question about fear by "deciding" on it. 'Ralph does understand that fear is a major problem to be handled: "’Things are breaking up. I don’t understand why. We began well! We were happy. And then—. . . Then people started getting frightened’" (p. 94). But he does not know that the question cannot be settled Piggy’s way—-by saying that there is nothing in it. He does not know that Simon's diffi dent suggestion that the boys themselves might be the beasts (pp. 103, 121) is a clue to its resolution, that the unknown evil within the boys causes fear and that Simon is not afra id because he is good. pJack then gets the chance to bring u£> the idea of hunting a beast outside; by arousing the boys’ wildness and violence more than he can earlier, he finally breaks up the "careful plan of this assembly" (p. 104), The fact that Ralph realizes the value of Piggy’s judgment, but 52 relies on it completely to the exclusion of Simon's is emphasized again. Ralph asks Piggy if’there is a beast and —------i believes him when he argues "scientifically" that there is none. Later, when the boys are afraid of the dead parachutist whom they consider to be a beast that hunts them, Simon's intuitive insight is again right and exactly the opposite of Piggy and Ralph's. This time Piggy and Ralph believe that the beast exists (p. 118), but Simon opposes them (p. 123). Again, Ralph does not understand Simon. He is crippled by his own fear so that Jack virtually takes over the leader ship. |7ack, who can control his own fear, sees this as an opportunity to gainpower„from Ralph. He insists that they hunt the beast. Ralph is so frightened that he is in his "personal hell" as soon as he realizes that he would have to lead the beast-hunt since he is the leader. And when Jack leads, he is "thankful to have escaped responsibility for a time" (p. 121). So Jack takes over the leadership while going on the hunt and returning from it. The boys' love of hunting makes them disobey Ralph but he can reassert his authority as their leader. After coming back from the hunt, however. Jack blows the conch for the first time as a chief. He declares Ralph a coward and a follower of Piggy and leaves Ralph's group, wanting the lovers of hunting to follow him. Even after, the group is broken, Simon offers the only 53 sensible suggestion that they go to the mountain to find out what the beast is, but since Piggy" dismisses the idea as a foolish one, Ralph does not pay attention to it either. If Ralph had gone he would have found it to be a dead parachutist as Simon does and would have been able to over come his fear just as he has been able to control his own violence by understanding it (p. 170). Ralph does not see that just as Piggy is right about keeping first things first, Simon is right about facing the unknown reality. If he had understood Simon, Ralph could at least have avoided his own and Piggy’s participation in Simon's murder. Both go to get meat from Jack's group but stay there because of fear and become party to murdering Simon when he comes to them with the good news that the beast is really a dead parachutist. A series of destructive acts follows Simon's murder; Piggy is killed and Ralph is hunted by Jack's group. , ■«rr»—» h Ralph, who cannot see why the boys would not understand the importance of rescue and of controlling their violence, does not see himself that by giving in to his fright and by not understanding Simon’s vision, he has contributed to tj the process of his own diminishing power, and he is the only practical force against chaos./ —s; .,■» J The difference between Simon and Ralph's ability to understand is stressed again symbolically, jwhile escaping Jack’s violence, Ralph reaches the place where the pig's head, which had metaphorically given revelatory answers 54 about the mysterious evil to Simon, is hung now in the form of a skull. For Ralph, the head stands for the fragile beauty of civilization sustained by following rules? it gleams "as white as ever the conch had done" (p. 221). Also, it stands for the ugly mystery that he has not been able to probe? it is a "filthy thing" but regards Ralph "like one who knows all the answers but won't tell" (p. 222). Thus both Simon and Ralph have projected their own different insights into the pig's head and skull. It is realized symbolically as well as literally that Ralph understands Piggy's Vision but not Simon's. Ralph watches the luminosity around the rock where Piggy had fallen: "the only whiteness here was the slow spilt milk, luminous round the rock forty feet below, where Piggy had fallen. Piggy was everywhere, was on this neck, was become terrible in darkness and death" (p. 28). But Ralph does not see the silvery beauty and brightness around Simon's dead body (p. 184). Later, on meeting the naval officer, he remembers Piggy as a wise dead friend but Simon as only dead. In one significant way, however, Ralph is closer to Simon than to Piggy though the novel does not present positive consequences of that knowledge, since Simon dies after acquiring the knowledge and Ralph leaves the island. Ralph, Piggy and Simon are all deluded about the ability of the adults to control chaos and bring peace instead, when they 55 find it difficult to maintain order on the island (p. 109). They do not realize that though the adults can control the hoys, they have not controlled themselves. They do not see that adults have begun a crazy and senseless war, which necessitated the children’s evacuation in the first place. When their prayers for adult help are answered ironically by a dead parachutist landing on the mountain and increasing problems, it is only Simon who smells its foul odor and understands the adult evil. Although Piggy’s delusion about adult-idealism is never broken, Ralph becomes disillusioned, though later than Simon. Ralph’s “dumb" look at the naval officer, when the latter is surprised to see English boys act like brutes, and his tears for the wickedness of man’s heart indicate that he intuitively sees that he himself is wiser than the naval officer. Ralph does not understand though that the naval officer is on his way to war and that unless the adults save themselves there is no naval officer, no adult-adult to save them. The entire epistemological range of types among the boys has an important meaning in relation to adults, the boys being a microcosmic form of one of the typical governing class of a mature society—bureaucratic administrator, saintly priest, engineer-technician, military man. Piggy’s mind Is that of an engineer-technologist and that of Simon as a saintly type, with no obvious pragmatic use to society in the workaday world, but absolutely essential for religious 56 Vision and spiritual guidance?^Ralph is the administrator type» who puts into practice the pragmatic means suggested by the technician, Jack being the militarist type who perpetuates savage violence within a civilization.1 In any society—like that of Athens in relation to Socrates—it is the seer-philosopher-saint who is first to be martyred; then the intelligentsia (as in Russian or Nazi purges or in American ideology) and typically, it is most likely the bureaucratic administrator who will survive along with the militarists. It is important that we the readers realize that though immediate control of evil from outside is essential for the physical survival of the boys, their longer survival depends on self-knowledge and self-control like Ralph’s and more than Ralph’s. A gradual salvation—freedom from evil— is essential for more than temporary survival for all types of people, as Simon’s vision indicates. The importance of ethical epistemology is thus largely seen by the reader who may perceive that the possibilities and limitations of Ralph’s knowledge of brutality and fear depend on his personality and circumstances? that only that knowledge of evil gained by Piggy, Simon and Ralph is valid which does help or could have helped Ralph in controlling it within himself and within others? and that its pragmatic use depends on Ralph’s individual personality: physical, mental, ethical and epistemological. Hence ethical epistemology is 57 a religion in Itself since it opens up preliminary avenues to survival and the possibilities for salvation,though pragmatic value is even more significant and is the imme diate goal. S? Chapter III Unlike Ralph, the protagonist of The Inheritors is incapable of serving a pragmatic purpose, though his circum stances are like Ralph's and require pragmatic understanding. Lok’s Simon-like personality is such that the focal point is the wide range of his understanding, wider than that of any of the characters in the novel, although not superior in speed or depth of penetration. Hence he serves as a touchstone against whom one can see how the other Neanderthals understand violence inflicted by the Homo Sapiens. Moreover, the Homo Sapiens’ knowledge of their own evils—violence, fear, lust, jealousy, hatred, animosity, magic, drunkenness, love of material objects—is illuminated by contrast with Lok’s understanding of them. Lok also understands subconsciously what may work out as a means of salvation for the Homo Sapiens, which Homo Sapiens Tuami senses too. However, like Ralph, Lok is suddenly faced with unusual violence, which he must control in order to survive. Ralph had lived in England under the protection of adults and Lok had lived without worry under his father Mai’s leader ship. On the island Ralph is abruptly faced with Jack’s violence and with his own tendencies towards it, just as Lok is confronted with the Homo Sapiens' brutality all of a sudden. Lok's people, the Neanderthals, have been spending 59 summers in the mountains for generations without any danger to their existence from another group of men, the only threats being animals (bears), natural elements (river, forest fire) and natural calamities (lightning, death). Without any warning, the Neanderthal family 18 has to face another tribe's violence, threatening the existence of the family, when Ha mysteriously disappears. And since Mai is near death the responsibility of leadership, according to his people's custom, falls on Lok. Fa is aware of her superiority in understanding violence and in avoiding danger. As a result she virtually takes over the leadership, both Lok and she being faced with the problem of understanding the violence of Homo Sapiens more imme diately than is the case with the other Neanderthals. But whereas Ralph is the best possible leader amongst the boys on the Pacific island for controlling violence, Lok is the least capable amongst his people. In contrast with Ralph's potential for cruelty, his reason, practical ability and love of his own life, Lok's complete innocence, intuition, interest in the mysterious, and child-like embracing of danger make him incapable of controlling evil. It is important that the reader understand?that the 18 The Neanderthal family consists of old father Mai and the mother "the old woman"; two young men, Ha and Lok; two young women, Fa and Nil; and two children, the girl Liku and the infant boy, "the new one." 60 same epistemological resources that make Lok incapable of controlling evil, nevertheless enable him to understand various facets of it, though often not consciously and clearly. As in Lord of the Flies, the reader knows more than, do Lok and the other characters, but his role is more active in The Inheritors. First, the reader’s superior knowledge is of greater importance in this work than is the case in most other novels because he also sees primitive cultures from a highly developed,sophisticated cultural vantage point. The mental, linguistic and spiritual re sources of Lok and the Neanderthals are so limited that the reader, with his developed brain, adequate language and moral sophistication, must interpret the mental pro cesses of Lok and the other Neanderthals, and must identify evil that the Neanderthals are unfamiliar with. He must also interpret their understanding which is largely on the sensuous, the sub-conscious and the intuitive levels. Second, the reader has an overall view of the novel? there fore, when the point of view shifts to that of the Homo Sapiens Tuami in the last ten pages of the novel, the reader observes that in spite of his limited mental resources, gentle Lok’s intuition enables him to understand the Homo Sapiens1 evil and misery vaguely, whereas Tuami has some ability to reason, but Tuami’s evil blinds him to the reality and he blames the Neanderthals for his own unhappiness. A brief discussion of the mental faculties of the 61 Neanderthals is necessary before analyzing their understandi ng of evil since the Neanderthal mind is like that of a child when faced with the problem of understanding adult evil of the Homo Sapiens. Thinking is unnatural to the Neanderthals? it is easier for them to be silent than to think and speak. When they are sitting around the fire, "one of the deep silences fell on them that seemed so much more natural than speech, timeless silence in which there were at first many minds in the over hang and then perhaps no mind at all" (p. 34). They commun icate their simple experiences without speaking? for instancy, Fa thinks that Lok has moved the log, but "Fa did not need to speak" since Lok understands that she thinks that he moved it (p. 12). Also, they can understand collectively what one of them is thinking? they understand without a word from Mai that he is thinking about death: Quite without warning, all the people shared a pict ure inside their heads. This was a picture of Eal, seeming a little removed from them, illuminated, shar ply defined in all his gaunt misery. They sawnot only Mai’s body but the slow pictures were waxing and waning in his head. One above all was displacing the others, dawning through the cloudy arguments and doubts and conjectures until they knew what it was he was thinking with such dull conviction. ’To-morrow or the day after, I shall die’ (pp. 38-39). Since silence is so natural to them, they strain their brows, or press their heads, or look towards each other for 62 help when they have to think. For instance, Mai's memory of a simple experience of childhood when he was on his father's back and his father had used a fallen tree to cross water, is a big strain on his mind? so he puts his hand on his head "as if confining the images that flickered there" (p. 15). Ingenuity, imagination, reasoning, distinc tion, clarity, and the like are as strenuous and rare mental experiences for them as memory. Being unable to identify their limited mental faculties, they use one word—- "picture"—for all of them. Instead of depending on thinking, they rely mainly on their intuitive ability in order to understand. And their senses play a very significant role in their understanding? especially their sense of smell as a substitute for conscious deductive reasoning and the sense of sight as a substitute for Imagination. Their sense of smell is far more sensitive and highly developed than ours and is much closer to that of animals. Faced with a danger to their survival from the Homo Sapiens, their mental faculties begin to grow according to their individual potential and circumstances. In the begin ning, it is very difficult for them to understand that any other group of similar creatures exists, much less that this group should be feared. The disappearance of the log they had used for crossing water instead of wading through it is too simple an occurrence to make them imagine the danger- 63 ous people, though Lok’s "uncertain" laugh shows the beginn ing of the process of understanding. At this point even Ha—their most "observant," "agile," "cautious" and "thought ful" "man of emergency"—searches "the forest with ear and nose for intruders" and "sniffs" the air to sense if an enemy is nearby (p. 13). Since he can neither smell, hear nor see the Homo Sapiens at this point, he doesznot realize that there are enemies on the island across from their overhang. Looking at the brokentrail, he can tell that the log has disappeared very recently. But even he thinks that it has either gone away by itself, or that water has taken it away (p. 14). A .little later when Mai understands the danger intui tively, neither he nor any other Neanderthal man can under stand it or interpret it. Mai intuitively understands that there is some danger to his family when he sees the Homo Sapiens* log (canoe) moving? his subconscious mind associ ates the moving canoe with the dangerous experience of the j past when fire had become uncontrollable and had burnt the forest: "So intent and fearful was this attention that Lok , turned to see if he could find what Mai was frightened of. There was nothing: only a log, mobed ..." and Mai says: "I have a picture. The fire is flying away into the forest and eating up the trees" (p. 45). The old woman and Fa fail to appreciate his intuitive sense. The old woman explains his panic and fear by reasoning that fire burnt a long time 64 back and that, therefore, Mai must have only remembered a past experience while sleeping. Fa says "defiantly" that "to-day is like yesterday and to-morrowr (p. 46), without realizing that it can ironically mean that there was danger in the past and that there can be a danger in the present and in the future. Mai’s intuition proves to be true. The extinction of the Neanderthals begins soon after, with the death of their man of emergency, Ha. Ha too has a developed intui tive sense and dimly perceives that the Homo Sapiens he meets is dangerous? but like a child, fascinated by him at the same time, he follows him and is killed. Nil who is with him and sees him follow the Homo Sapiens with fright and fascination, reports this incident to her family. She only knows that Ha has disappeared but does not fully understand that he has been killed? "there is the end of Ha scent" and Ha "is gone," she says. Her understanding of the Homo Sapiens is vague? she says that she smelt "something" and saw "nobody." The old woman and Mai, who are the wisest in the eyes of the family, cannot ascertain that Ha was in danger and they continue to eat, being unable to imagine "a new thing" without seeing and smelling It. None of them at this point (not even Nil, who saw Ha going) understands the importance of Mai’s intuition, including Mai himself. The irony is that after Ha and Mai’s death and after 65 more contact with the Homo Sapiens, three of the four adult survivors—the old woman, Fa and Lok—understand Mai's intuition consciously. After Lok tells his family that he found that the Homo Sapiens exist and that Ha is gone, the entire family is "enmeshed, exalted and tormented" in dreams that night, uttering cries of "pleasure and fear" as if it understands the danger. And the old woman who watches them sleeping understands and puts Mil’s intuition more clearly than Mai, without confusing the present with the past: "Now, is like when the fire flew away and ate up all the trees" (p. 93). Much later, Fa and Lok understand Mai's insight consciously (pp. 197, 198). However, since Nil and the old woman are killed next, Fa and Lok remain the adult survivors who know not only the Homo Sapiens' violence but also their evil fear, although it is left to the reader to make a causal connection between violence and fear. The differences Golding presents between the growth of Lok and Fa's understanding of the Homo Sapiens' are remarkable. Earlier, one could see that Mai and Lok do not assert themselves at all and that the old woman and Fa are assertive. But Fa and Lok are so subtly and skilfully distinguished ftam each other throughout that one can see why their understanding differs so significantly, though both of them are innocent and mentally undeveloped. Mentally they are like the other Neanderthals? they rely 66 more on silence than on thinking and they use their senses as a source of knowledge. Spiritually, they are non-violent and are unfamiliar with evil fear. Like children, Lok and Fa are attracted by the Homo Sapiens* strange evil and even drink their new and fascinating mead. And for a short time they have a different experience^-a parody of the Homo Sapiens* drunkenness as their heads spin, they laugh, they shout and they argue. Lok feels he has the Homo Sapiens’ power in him and thinks that he would be able to move a big log as they but finds that he cannot. He thinks he is initiated into the Homo Sapiens* way of life, but the stomachs of Lok and Fa reject the mead. After contact with the Homo Sapiens, their personalities do not change in any ethical sense but they fulfill their intellectual potentialities. Lok has the ability to probe into the mystery of the Homo Sapiens, whereas Fa is capable of acquiring practical knowledge. Hence Fa. only understands the Homo Sapiens• violence and fear, though more distinctly than Lok, whereas Lok understands several facets of their evil personality as well as their humanity, though most of the time on a sensuous, and a sub-conscious intuitive level so that he himself is not aware that he understands so much. Both Fa and Lok break the epistemological norms of their family by entering the practical and the mysterious areas of knowledge respectively. Being unable to identify mental functions, the Neanderthals have rigidified the 67 functions of men and women as if the mysterious is the monoply of the female head of the family and the practical knowledge that of the male head of the family. The younger members of the family are not supposed to enter the area assigned to the other sex. t'Oa" (besides representing the life- principlet' stands for the mysterious, and "picture" (besides signifying mental processes unidentified by the Neanderthals) stands for practical knowledge. The rigidity of these formulations is best illustrated in the following two incidents. When the old woman wants Fa to go to 0a7 who she thinks has a mysterious way of prolonging; dying Mai's life, Lok and Fa know that Lok is not allowed to go with Fa. On the other hand, a woman is not allowed to enter the men's area. When the family is wondering about what should be done to find the Homo Sapiens and Nil offers a suggestion, the old woman snubs her for interfering as Lok should say what should be done and not Nil: "Nil sniffed again. 'Let Lok go and find him.' The old woman rebuked her. 'A woman for Oa and a man for the pictures in his head. Let Lok speak.*" (p. 70). Lok and Fa are most anxious to enter the sphere of the other sex? Fa asserts Ha's and her own wisdom against Mai's when both Ha and Fa think that Mai's order to send Liku on a food hunt is not right as Liku is a small child. It is significant that such a challenge is unusual and that consequently an "indefinable tension" results, which breaks 68 when thay obey (pp. 46-47). Lok enters the old woman's field of knowledge because he believes that the old woman knows more than he: "He remembered the old woman, so close to Oa, knowing so indescribably much, the doorkeeper to whom all secrets were open" (p. 61). And his interest in the mysterious compels him to enter Oa's sanctuary even though he knows that the old woman would be angry if she came to know of it. (It turns out that the old woman interprets Oa in her simple and ignorant way? she believes that Oa is bountiful and would give life to Mai, but Oa does not do so. Oa, ironically, symbolizes the cruel universe). Lok's visit to the Oa sanctuary is important symbolically as it represents his probe into this evil universe? the "deepest black" and the echo of Fa's words--0a, sick—in the sanctuary frighten Lok. Fa's potential for practical knowledge is superior to that of Neanderthal men. Mai had the wisdom to use a stone to cut a branch just as his father had the wisdom to use a fallen tree to cross water. But Fa's two ideas about practical comfort are more ingenious, though she cannot continue to develop them, though she has no vocabulary to define them and though they are far from being materia lized. She comes up with the imaginative idea—agricultural ingenuity in its initial stage—when she wants to grow food instead of eating the causal fruits of nature. She 69 does not understand the idea clearly, but it becomes obvious to the reader what she means when she thinks thatAit.would be good if her family’s place of shelter and food were at the same place: Lok belched at the patch and looked at it affectionately. 'This is a good place.* Fa frowned and munched. 'If the patch were nearer—' She swallowed her mouthful with a gulp. 'I have a picture. The good food is growing. Not here. It is growing by the fall.* Lok laughed at her. 'No plant like this grows near the falli* (p. 49). She thinks about the possibility of carrying water in shells instead of hands. (And for the first time, she names the process by which her mind is functioning at the moment as "picture of a picture," as "thinking"). 'I am by the sea and I have a picture. This is a picture of a picture. I am—' She screwed up her face and scowled—'thinking.'. . . Fa went on speaking. 'I have a picture of the people emptying the shells by the sea. Lok is shaking bad water out of a shell.’ . . . Then Lok saw the strain go out of her face and knew that they were sharing a picture. It came to him too, a meaningless jumble of shells (pp. 62-63). Lok does .not understand either of the two ideas. Not only is Fa's imagination about practical ideas foreign to him, but he relies on his senses for the mysterious knowledge so much that when he begins to wonder about a mystery and 70 finds it difficult to understand, he leaves thinking and comes back to using his senses to know it. For instance, he wonders about the geological relationship between the rocks, the river and the forest, but he "abandons“ the thought "with relief": This part of the country with its confusion of rocks that seemed to be arrested at the most tempestuous moment of swirling, and that river down there spilt among the forest were too complicated for his head to grasp, though his senses could find a devious path across them. He abandoned thought with relief. Instead he flared his nostrils, and searched for the hyenas but they were gone (p. 41). Golding's greater achievement—greater than distingui shing between the mental faculties of Lok and Fa—lies in showing through their ethical personalities that Lok's potential is for understanding the mysterious evil as well as the humanity of the Homo Sapiens and that Fa's potential is for gaining practical knowledge necessary for at least a temporary survival against them. Fa's attitude when confronting an ethical situation is pragmatic? Lok's is damagingly honest. After his visit to the Oa sanctuary, Lok starts to tell the old woman about his experience in the sanctuary, though he knows that she did not want him to go there. But Fa stops him since she realizes that the old woman will be angry and she cautions him a second time not to tell the old woman. Later, Fa's attitude 71 towards eating meat is matter-of fact and Lok’s is humanistic. When Fa and Lok see the doe killed by some animal, Lok acknow ledges the "darkness" and tries to convince himself that there is no-‘blame" in eating the doe as it was not killed by them, but Fa wants him to stop talking about that. Later, when Fa decides to take the Neanderthal baby boy back from the Homo Sapiens, Lok thinks that they would be cheating the Homo Sapiens even when"stealing" their own child back. But Fa is not bothered by such "conscience." Lok differs from Fa in another way which again shows that she is more practical. Fa loves her life more than Lok loves his own; Lok embraces danger like a child, Fa avoids it like an adult. Shortly after hearing from Lok that Ha fell in the river and that a Homo Sapiens was with him, she intuitively but consciously associates the Homo Sapiens’ danger with their smoke. On seeing the smoke, she is afraid and decides not to go with Lok on his second search for Ha and the Homo Sapiens, but Lok goes. As if events in nature are somehow, sometimes related to one's capacities, Fa is the one who gets into circum stances where she can understand the Homo Sapiens’ cruelty. Since she stays back, she happens to watch them kill Nil and the old woman. Later she watches them eat Liku, whereas Lok does not see either of these incidents. She becomes more "cautious," "agile," and "frightened" after meeting the Homo Sapiens. And her practical effort to save Lok from the Homo Sapiens and to get Liku and the baby back, 72 begins to work. When she tells Lok to throw away the Homo Sapiens* arrow (which Lok takes to be a gift), she seems to have arrived at this conclusion through a reasoned deduction; she had told Lok a little earlier that they had killed the old woman and Nil; now she understands that, their arrow is dangerous. She cautions Lok against speaking loudly. She takes the courage to go across the river to the Homo Sapiens* island, though Lok does not want to take this risk. After seeing them, she realizes that in order to live they must not try to get Liku and the new one back, and Lok senses this. However, she cannot give up and plans to take Liku and the baby one night. But the Homo Sapiens are too evil, too fast and too alert for her to be successful against them. Before she can run away with Liku, Liku is eaten. Next she attempts to run away with the baby, but she fails even to get- him and is instead wounded by the Homo Sapiens V poisonous arrow. She entrusts the job to Lok next time and takes the responsibility of throwing stones on the Homo Sapiens herself. But Lok catches Tanakil instead and wants to know from her what happened to Liku. And Fa's device, which had worked against hyenas, is too simple to succeed against the Homo Sapiens' bows and arrows. Though Fa gives up and "linply sits” on the brances which take her away into the river and drown her, and Lok dies after her, she keeps him alive till this point by controlling his foolish overtures towards the Homo Sapiens. 73 But Lok begins to sense danger earlier than Fa. He is the first one to see Ha's death symbolically, though he takes a long time to be able to interpret it. He smells the “strange, indefinable newness of the spray-smell" (p. 28), which carries the new evil of the Homo Sapiens who have • settled on the island across from the fall one or two days before (p. 13). And Lok’s mind associates the evil;smell with the mysterious? he sees the old woman's ball of clay which represents the mysterious for him and smells the evil smell simultaneously. On sensing the unknown evil, a feeling of “emptiness" overpowers him (foreshadowing)? he falls down (foreshadowing fall)? and he watches the weed-tails (the ■jo Homo Sapiens)^ when he is in this position—foreshadowing fall and the Homo Sapiens' role in the fall. It becomes clear to the reader that Lok had foreseen Ha's fall when a little later Lok smells the same complex smells that he had when he had fallen, sees the saane weed-tails moving when he leans down, but finds that Ha's scent ends exactly at the place where he had fallen himself so precariously. When he actually sees the Homo Sapiens, he understands that they are dangerous? he associates their movements with The weed-tails represent the Homo Sapiens because their movements aré exactly parallel to those of the Homo Sapiens. Lok sees that “a weed-tail was moving backwards and forwards, more than the length of a man each time11 (p. 108). And later he notices that the Homo Sapiens "were balanced on top of their legs, their waists so wasp-thin that when they moved their bodies swayed backwards and forwards" (p. 143). 74 those of a bear who had chased his people and had frightened them(p. 79). The same night his nightmare makes the intuition clearer (p. 94). He still cannot grasp the idea that the Homo Sapiens had thrown Ha into the river, because on waking up, he says that perhaps Ha has not fallen into the river (p. 96). But on watching the Homo Sapiens* activities for a long time, he understands for the first time consciously that Ha was in danger from the Homo Sapiens: "He had a picture of Liku looking up with soft and adoring eyes at Tanakil, guessed how Ha had gone with a kind of eager fearfulness to meet his sudden death" (p. 191). The irony is that though he does understand how Ha must have died by partly associating Ha and Liku’s simple fascination for the Homo Sapiens, he does not understand that Liku has died too. He misses many hints to Liku’s death. Lok notices that the vegetarian food of his people is not food for the Homo Sapiens (pp. 103, 153), and that they are hungry (pp. 143, 153), but he does not realize that they depend only on meat for food? they are hungry obviously because they have not been able to bunt an animal. He sees the crisis amongst the Homo Sapiens which had led to Liku's being eaten by them but does not understand.it/ when Pine-tree finds that Marian is secretly eating meat (which was thrown into the Homo Sapiens* clearing by Lok for Liku), all the Homo Sapiens get wildly angry with Mariah, since he is their leader and they are hungry also. 75 Marian tries to take the Neanderthal baby boy from Vivani, it seems, to satisfy their hunger and anger. But Vivani, does not give the baby to Marian. Immediately after this Lok sees that Fa is watching something intently and fear fully? he realizes that she prevents him from seeing what she is herself watching, he notices that Fa stops talking about taking Liku away? he sees that the Homo Sapiens shrink their bodies whenever they hear Lok say "Liku"? he is aware that Tanakil always screams at Liku's name? he knows that "a smear on the smoothed earth that had been a slug" is pointed out "mournfully" to him by Fa on his saying that Liku must be in one of the canoes (p. 198)? but he cannot put these facts together consciously and cannot deduce that Liku was eaten. By the time everybody in the family has died, it seems that he puts the facts together subconsciously and understands intuitively, since he visits the smear, smells it and digs out the bone, Oa, which Liku had always kept with her. If it is so difficult for Lok even to understand that the Homo Sapiens have caused his people's death, it is even harder for him to understand the cause behind the Homo Sapiens* cruelty. Again, Fa understands the Homo Sapiens* fear, just as she understands their violence, without much effort. However Lok and Fa do not know that the Homo Sapiens are cruel because they project their own evil into the Neanderthals. Since they are afraid that the Neaderthals will kill them, 76 they kill the Neanderthals? using his reasoned deduction the reader understands this clearly as he has the benefit of not only seeing through Lok's eyes but also of seeing through the Homo Sapiens' point of view in the last chapter. Lok views the Homo Sapiens' leader Marian dressed as a dancing stag-magician, anointing two men whose duty it is to pierce the heart of a stag made by Tuami out of earth, but he does not understand that this entire action represents a ritual destruction of the Neanderthals. He sees that the artificial sacrificial stag looks exactly like Marian when he is "enraged or frightened" (p. 215), but he does not realize that this stag is a projection of ¡Brian's evil nature and fright. He notices that it is red ana that it seems to be "in the act of frantic cruelty" but does not know that it represents the brutality Homo Sapiens imagine in the red Neanderthals (p. 199). Even on seeing that the Homo Sapiens are afraid of the Neanderthal baby boy and that Marian is frightened of this stag (p. 149), he does not interpret the stag as symbolic of the Homo Sapiens* fear of the Neanderthals. However, when under the influence of the Homo Sapiens' mead he .imagines himself telling Marian, who is in the shape of the sacrificial stag, that.he’is one of the Homo Sapiens, it seems as if Lok knows very vaguely that his problems arose because he was not one of them. Besides understanding violence and fear intuitively Lok understands other facets of evil in the Homo Sapiens. 77 His excitement for the novelty in the Homo Sapiens makes him watch the cruelty in their lust, the fierceness in Marian’s leadership, the intense hatred of the other Homo Sapiens towards Marian and the strange happiness in their drunkenness. However, Lok has no vocabulary for these evils, since these experiences are foreign to his people. They wear no hides and drink no elaborately prepared mead. They believe in eating meat only if an animal has been killed by another animal. Their leader Mai is not magician using his people for his own evil ends. They do not know lust. Lok and Ha share Nil and Fa but there is no jealousy and animosity either in the women or in the men. Therefore, every time Lok sees any of the evils in the Homo Sapiens (except their love of material possessions; which he does not find “menacing"), his body responds by being tightened, chilled and frozen. It seems to him throughout that they have a strange “scent" and "odour?" thus he "smells" their spiritual decay. He again and again associates them and things around them, even before meeting them, not only with mystery but also with darkness (though he does not know consciously that this darkness represents their spiritual blindness). He notices that they are desperate and miserable, but he does not realize that these are the consequences of evil on the Homo Sapiens themselves. Finally, he is “sorry for them as for a woman who has the sickness" (p. 193)? Lok only senses the Homo Sapiens1 78 spiritual malady, Simon of Lord of the Flies knows that the boys’ sickness is spiritual. Lok's innocence, in fact, enables him to see not only the Homo Sapiens' evil but also their humanity. He regards the Homo Sapiens as human like himself though he realizes that they are so very different from him. He finds simila rities between them and his own people? Marian's hair is grey and white like Mai's, and the marks Tuami makes on the patch of ground are like the line the old woman drew around Mai's body. For him Tanakil is a child just as Liku is. Noticing the Homo Sapiens' happy moments, he "suns" in them.with delight. He is happy to see Chestnut-head and Tuft liking each other and the former helping the latter carry a bundle. He is overjoyed to see that the distance between Tanakil and Liku finally narrows so that they are laughing together and that temporarily Tanakil's mother Twal joins them in laughing. Vivani feeding the Neanderthal baby boy is an exhilarating sight for him. He also admires the Homo Sapiens for their creativity? Tuami's ability to make a stag out of earth, for instance. Finally, he sees the changes brought by the Homo Sapiens in his life—that his own understanding has grown because of them and that his suffering is caused by them: The new head knew that certain things were gone and done with like a wave of the sea. It knew that misery must be embraced painfully as a man might hug thorns to him and it sought to comprehend the new people 79 from whom all changes came. Lok discovered ’Like.1 He had used likeness all his life without being aware of it. ... Now, in a convulsion of the understanding Lok found himself using likeness as a tool (p. 194). His similes at this point indicate that he understands somewhat consciously the Homo Sapiens* immense capabilities for pleasure in evil thing, their role in bringing about changes and their potential for love and therefore for salvation. When the point of view shifts to that of the Homo Sapiens in the last chapter, one notices that Tuami’s attempt to understand himself and his people revolves around the same three areas that Lok understands (with his senses, and with mixed subconscious and conscious intuition): evil, change, and salvation. First, the Homo Sapiens are very much aware of their grief but are completely ignorant about the fact that their misery is caused by their own spiritual degeneration. Tuami does not understand that his own lust, hatred and desire for an intoxicant are largely responsible for his grief? he feels a sudden lust and hatred for Vivani? he realizes that he wants to stab Marian? he knows that be is angry with the women for not bringing the sails? he knows that he is yearning for the mead—but he cannot see that Vivani, Marian and the women are not his problems as much as he himself is. Second, since the Homo Sapiens do not understand their own evil they blame the Neanderthals for the miserable 80 changes in their own lives. Marian and Tuami are constantly worried that the Neanderthals will follow them and will kill them though they have left the Neanderthal men's place. They project their own violence into the Neanderthals and do not realize that the cause of evil and fear lies within themselves and that the Neanderthals are innocent. * Tuami1 does not see that his fear of the Neanderthal baby boy is irrational? hence he worries that Since he cannot kill the baby because of Vivani's love for him, there would be more sacrifice, confusion and unhappiness when he grows up (p. 231). When Tanakil's mother Twal says to Tuami with "grief and hate" that Tuami and Marian gave her child "to the devils and they have given ".-her >"back a changeling who does not see or speak," Tuami thinks "in panic: they have given me back a changed Tuami" (pp. 228-229). Tuami finds it difficult to sleep on remembering "the night in Tanakil's eyes" and wishes that he had not saved Liku as a joke (p. 228) evidently because he is associating Tanakil's insanity with her love for Liku, without realizing that Tanakil did not become insane while living with Liku but after he and the other Romo Sapiens ate Liku. Third, there is some possibility of salvation for Homo Sapiens Tuami. Although he misinterprets his own evil to a considerable degree, he does begin to understand first, that the area of evil is wide? second, that some "compulsion" within him had started the process of change 81 in the past; third, that somehow the Homo Sapiens must row the boat of their life properly; fourth, that in some mysterious way Vivani and the Neanderthal baby’s strange love-relationship is a ray of hope. He realizes that though he thinks his grief would end by killing Marian,"who would sharpen a point against the darkness“of the world?" (p. 231) Several times he considers the idea of throwing away the knife. When he tries to understand the phenomena of change in the Homo Sapiens• life, he is able to find the point where the change began, when they left their paradisical forest for the Neanderthals’ fall(p. 225). He remembers that some compulsion in him had made him follow Marian as leader whereas Marian had left the forest because of his lust for Vivani (p. 226$: Adam left paradise because of his lust for Eve. Though he does not put the blame on himself and Marian as much as on the Neanderthals after this, it is important that he realizes Marian’s and his own "compulsion?,f though vaguely and that he thinks: "Perhaps if they squared off the boat, stowed things more properly—?“ (p. 225) And gradually, Tuami sees a ray of hope in loving the Neanderthal baby. Twice the baby brings all the Homo Sapiens, including Marian, "together” when they respond to him with "love and fear" (pp. 230-231). When the baby’s active movements and bright eyes bring them close to each other the third time, Tuami has a revelatory experience. 82 Tuami had realized before that only Vivani had somehow not changed like them because of her relationship with the baby (p. 229^. He had saved the baby to make Vivani happy— to satisfy her yearning for a baby after her child died. Now he sees Vivani and the baby as a "password" and concen trates more on the shapeless haft of his knife, which looks like Vivani and the baby together, instead of focu sing his attention on the blade of his knife: Then the devil appeared, arse-upward, his little rump pushing against the nape of her neck. Even the sombre Marian twisted his weary face into a grin. Vakiti could not straighten course for his wild laughing and Tuami let the ivory drop from his hands. The sun shone on the head and the rump and quite suddenly everything was all right again and the sands had sunk back to the bottom of the pool. The rump and the head fitted each other and made a shape you could feel with your hands. They were waiting in the rough ivory of the knife-haft that was so much more important than the blade. They were an answer, the frightened, angry love of the woman and the ridi culous, intimidating rump that was wagging at her head, they were a password. His hands felt for the ivory in the bilges and he could feel in his fingers how Vivani and her devil fitted it (p. 233). This epiphanous experience has not transformed Tuami into a good person, but he is looking Somewhat in the right direction, searching for answers to his problems and one solution, which he very vaguely understands here is, gf course, the importance of love for the only survivor of the Neanderthals—-an antidote to his fear of the baby and hence to his consequent grief. 83 He tries to look forward to see if there is an end to the line of darkness: "it was so long, and there was such a flashing from the water that he could not see if the line of darkness had an ending" (p. 233). But there might be an ending that he cannot see now, that he may see later. That there is some hope for Tuami can also be viewed from the fact that faced with his own "confusion" he tries to "understand," whereas Marian makes no such attempt and remains completely deluded, it is significant that Tuami's self-analysis results In some understanding though it is not much and is very vague. However, Tuami's evil blinds him-to the entire truth about himself. Neither the evil Homo Sapiens can control violen— cte within themselves nor the innocent Neanderthals can stop it outside themselves. The Homo Sapiens have physically sur vived and have wiped the Neanderthals out of existence but their own survival is a miserable one. For a happy survival they need a salvation from evil, which is possible only according to their extrememly limited potential for it. But an attempt to understand their own evil is an indispen sable preliminary step towards that salvation. Though the questions of pragmatism, survival and salvation are explored skilfully in The Inheritors, Golding’s greatest achievement is the presentation of the epistemo logical processes of the primitive Neanderthals, who are so different from us, the modern men. Much more imagination 84 is necessary to distinguish between the personalities and understanding of the primitive Neanderthals, and that too so briefly, since they are innocent and have undeveloped minds, whereas it is comparatively easier to distinguish between characters who are evil since there are so many facets to wickedness. The epistemological development of the characters in the other Golding novels resembles ours even when they do not belong to our age. The Homo Sapiens are differentiated from each other with the same preciseness; they think very much like us but their minds are shown to be less developed than ours, they being Several ages behind us in the evolutionary process. The_ Inheritors, therefore, is more of an epistemological tour de force than any of the other Golding novels. Chapter IV In his next novel Pincher Martin Golding presents a protagonist who stands at the opposite pole of epistemo logical resources from Lok of The Inheritors. Christopher is ethically inferior hut mentally superior to Lok. Primitive Lok cannot even think of living at the cost of other people’s lives* "civilized" Christopher is obsessed with selfishness. Christopher’s adult brain, unlike Lok's childlike one, is tremendously developed. He belongs to the modern age of science. Before his death, he was a university student, a writer, an actor and a naval officer. The two ethically and mentally opposite persons naturally require different circumstances for understanding evil? but*the two extreme personalities begin to understand in extreme circumstances. Lok understands the Homo Sapiens when faced with their violence; Christopher begins to understand only when a tremendous threat comes to his self-sufficiency and to his survival—only after he dies physically. Christopher had many opportunities to understand his own evil in his life, but he had ignored them; he had to die before he could be compelled to face the truth about himself. However, the irony and the paradox in Christopher’s epistemological situation is just as poignant as it is in 86 Lok’s. The same innocence and undeveloped brain, which make it possible for Lok to understand the Homo Sapiens* evil undistorted, can enable him to understand it most of the time only vaguely and subconsciously; and the same evil and developed brain which make it possible for Christopher to know his own evil clearly and consciously compel?.him to distort his understanding. On Lok’s childlike brain reality registers largely symbolically. The problem for the reader is to interpret his sensuous and intuitive understanding. In tracing Christopher’s epistemological development also, the reader's role is active for different reasons. Here Christopher’s adult brain creates obscurity; in an attempt to believe that he is surviving physically, he creates multifarious hallucinations and delusion. His ability to understand clearly his own precarious situation changes the same images of delusion into the ones that reveal reality. Thus the hallucinatory images, dialogues, and scenes are most of the time revelatory as well, and the reader must separate the two to see what Christopher’s delusion and understanding are. Depending on an abstract and unique subject—the epistemological conflict and change of a lone survivor (physically dead but spiritually living)—this novel lacks the variety of social dramatic conflict of the previous two. But the meaningful imagery in some parts of the novel 87 brilliantly compensates for this lack of social conflict. Before discussing the epistemological imagery and change in Christopher's understanding, it is important to see his epistemological struggle between the delusion that he is living and the reality that he has died. When the novel begins, Christopher's "centre," "consciousness," "mind,“-—his soul—has already separated from his body. Thus "he" in the novel is Christopher's "centre" alone and not his entire being. The pattern of alternation between delusion and realization—the delusion that his body is functioning and the realization that it is completely limp but that the "centre" is imagining its movements--in the very beginning of the novel is the same as the later pattern of wavering between self-illusion and facing reality. The opening sentences combine this alternation: "He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body. There was no up or down, no light and no air. Re felt his mouth open of Itself and the shrieked word burst out. 'Kelpl1" (italics mine). With the imaginary help of his mouth, he tries to say the word "mother," but he can only say "Moth—" as if he is aware of the irony that a dead man is asking his original source of life for assistance. The next sentence makes even clearer that Christopher's body is already dead: "But the man lay suspended behind the whole commotion. 88 detached from his jerking body" (p. 8).2® As soon as Christopher consciously realizes that he has no control over his life, he begins consciously to distort the reality of his physical death. The memory of the little homunculus in the toy jar of his childhood makes him aware that his power to control is gone now; the toy "was interesting because one could see into a little world there which was quite separate but which one could control" (italics mine, p. 8). Henceforward Christopher convinces himself that he can use his lifebelt, though he is dead (p. 9). The next step is to believe that he can feel himself taking his sea boots off, though he "suddenly" realizes that "he was not struggling but limp," and that "a swell was washing regularly over his head" (p. 10). The reality of his first death,—physical death—flashes on him constantly, though he tries not to face it. He thinks that he is "like a dead man!" but does not admit it (p. 34). He finds it "strange that bristles go on growing even when the rest of you is—" but does not dare use the word "dead" and admit that he is imagining (p. 125). Be wonders if his sockets would be closed (p. 141), but "That1 not real. Thread of life, Hang on. That’s not real" (p. 142). He does not want to see his lifeless face (p. 195) 20 Bernard S. Dick, William Golding (New York, 1967), p. 50, and Samuel Hynes, William Golding (New York, 1964), p. 26, think that Christopher dies on the second page of the novel. My point is that Christopher is dead when the novel begins. 89 Similarly, he realizes that his second death is imminent, but he tries to forget that this, spiritual death will come. Believing that his "centre” can continue to live without his body, he refers to his present state of suspension between the physical and the spiritual deaths as an "uneasy intermission" (p. 90), as if it were an interval between two lives and not between two deaths. He knows that his being is in fragments• Christopher, Hadley and Martin—the three parts of his name—"were separate frag ments and the centre was smouldering with a dull resentment that they should have broken away and not be sealed on the centre." But he deludes himself that "self existed, though Christopher and Hadley and Martin were fragments far off" (p. 161). The "dark, invulnerable centre" is "certain" of its "own sufficiency" (p. 163). Again, Christopher's "centre" deludes himself that though there "was a gap of not being," that though he "was dead," "now the pieces of me have come together and 1 am just alive" (p. 168). To evade the reality, he plays the imaginary roles of heroes,suffering in one moment as he sees the truth, in another moment because he tries to cover it up.X For instance, he realistically compares his position to Ajax one time but unrealistically to Atlas and Prometheus another time; if Ajax reminds Christopher of reality about his own situation, Atlas and Prometheus help him hide the truth painfully. He sees himself as a Christ figure when he 90 fixes up a cross over the imaginary "dwarf and he imagines © the red. deposit in the water marking a cross "across his chest." But he is compelled to see that "because of what" he did he is "an outsider and alone" (p. 181), that he is suffering because of his evil, rather than his redemptory, deeds. Though he tries to play the roles of great heroes, he cannot forget the painful reality that he would be happy if he did not play them but instead admitted that he cannot make himself live when he has died. He knows that even "an hour" on his imaginary rock "is a life time. . . <.. There is nothing here but torture, . . . Give up the thought of return, the thought of living. Break up, leave go" (p. 45). He learns that he has had "enough of" surviving and "hanging on" (p. 195), but he cannot accept his death. Since he persists in living, he creates more and more torture for himself, in fact, his own purgatory. Ke imagines tears of sympathy for his plight on the half- forgotten but now clearly remembered faces of his mother, Sybil, Alfred and Helen, but soon realizes that these are "acid" tears of their sufferings at his hands and that hence they have become his purgatory: Their tears made a pool on the stone floor so that his feet were burned to the ankles. He scrabbled to climb up the wall and the scalding stuff welled up his ankles to his calves, his knees. .. . . They were falling freely, dropping on him, One came, a dot, a 91 pearl, a ball, a globe, that moved on him, spread. He began to scream. He was inside the ball of water that was burning him to the bone and past. It consumed him utterly. He was dissolved and spread throughout the tear an extension of sheer, disem bodied pain (pp. 144-145). The irony of Christopher’s situation is that the same hallucinations that he creates to be happy and to prove his physical survival become the means not only of his intense suffering but also of his spiritual death. It is in these hallucinations that the ambivalent epistemo logical imagery makes parts of the novel a prose poem. Once Christopher decides to "think" about "what can be done" (p. 17) to believe that his body has not died, his imagi nation begins to invent series of unreal situations. For instance, he imagines that he is safe on a rock, but the moment of inventing the rock becomes almost simultaneous with the realization that safety on the rock is even more dangerous and painful than imaginary swimming: "With a destroying shock he hit solidity. ... Yet this solidity was terrible and apocalyptic after the world of inconstant wetness. It was not vibrant as a ship’s hull might be but merciless and mother of panic. . . . The sight of this rock floating in mid-Atlantic was so dreadful that he wasted his air by screaming as if it had been a wild beast" (pp. 21-22). And he suffers as he keeps realizing that the rocks are unreal (pp. 30, 31. 163, 167, 174) and. . 92 that they are a hallucinatory transformation of his teeth (pp. 24, 125, 129, 174).Hence his effort to prove that they are real is intensely poignant (pp. 163, 167). If his teeth take a hallucinatory form as rocks, his white hands become the dead claws of red lobster and butcher’ hands. In an attempt to believe that he is alive, he imagines that sea-gulls with claws like vampires are waiting to eat him as soon as he dies. But he is eaten by his own claws. In his hallucination he is on the rock of his own teeth (p. 91) and this rock is destroyed by his own claws (pp. 200-201). His claws and his "centre" are destroyed by the black lightning (p. 201), which is also an hallucination. But he invents the black lightning just as he imagines the rock and the claws—in an attempt to prove physical survival. In order to believe that the three parts of his name— Christopher, Hadley and Martin—are not fragments, he creates several images of three's, such as the three limpets, the three rocks, the three days of survival, the three lights in the windows, the three mirrors, the three eternities and the three anemones. But the triplets finally culminate Hynes, p. 24, believes that Christopher “realizes that perhaps his Whole effort to survive—rock and all—has been a subjective creation,“ in the middle of Chapter eleven. But I think that though Christopher admits clearly in Chapter eleven that he has invented the “rock and all," he is certain in this chapter as well as before that he has invented them. 93 in three branches of lightning which he dreads terribly (p. 177), since they are the symbolic means of his complete annihilation. Hoping to have the happiness of living, Christopher creates the suffering of spiritual death for himself. And it is even more ironical that while evading the truth about his death, he is compelled more and more to see the truth about his own ethical personality, that while refusing to change ethically, he changes epistemologically, though as in the case of the other protagonists the reader knows more than Christopher and the other characters. The same toy jar that had made him aware that he cannot control anything now after his death also illuminates for him his remorseless exploitation of others. He remembers that even in his childhood he enjoyed pushing down the glass figure in the jar: By varying the pressure on the membrane you could do anything you liked with the glass figure which was wholly in your power. You could mutter, —sink now! And down it would go, down, down? you could steady it and relent. You could let it struggle towards the surface, give it almost a bit of air then send it steadily, slowly, remorselessly down and down" (p. 9). Later, the only song he sings to relax himself indicates his pleasure in torturing others. He begins to sing a popular French song: "Alouette, gentille, Alouette." One recalls that in it the different parts of the lark's 94 body are named; the singer is supposed to pluck feathers from each one of those parts; for instance: "je te plumerai, je te plumerai la tete." Though the original popular song, as commonly interpreted, imply actual torture, it is signi ficant that Christopher selects a song with such a theme. The process of understanding his own nature is not simple for Christopher. His intelligence, dominated by his obsessions for self-love and exploitation, compels him to evade the complete truth about his evil personality, just as he has attempted to believe that he is not physically dead. On the one hand, his intelligence objectively sees a pattern in different types of exploitation; on the other hand, the same intelligence rationalizes his own selfishness as if his exploitations were not exceptional and he were not the epit ome of self-love. He sees "eating" as a universal process amongst the Fascists, religious people and cannibals. And "eating with the mouth was only the gross expression of what was the universal process. You could eat with your cock or with your fists or with your voice. You could eat with hob.- nailed boots or buying and selling or marrying and begetting or cuckolding—" (p, 88) While justifying his own evil, he is reminded of it even more specifically; the word "cuckolding" reminds him of his relations with his friend Alfred’s fiancee Sybil. He relives the experience of enjoying Alfred's suffering on finding them together and remembers how "secure" he had felt "in his 95 knowledge of the cosmic nature of eating" (p. 89). He recalls only as a routine event his relations with his producer friend Peter’s wife Helen and Peter’s consequent poignant suffer ing. His memory of the greater sins, however, is somewhat pathetic. He sees momentarily that he is suffering now for "plundering" Mary. Her eyes, full of "implacable hate," "were the death sentence of Actaeon" (p. 148). Mary could not take a revenge like the goddess, but Christopher suffers emotionally now and would "devour" himself. This incident with Mary haunts him and not the ones with Sybil and Helen, evidently because he realizes subconsciously that those two women were willing parties to his exploitation of their fiancé and husband respectively, whereas he had raped Mary. But he justifies the rape: "eyes of the artificial woman, confounded on her pretences and evasion, forced to admit her own crude, human body" (p. 152). Christopher realizes that his obsession for Mary’s body had taken several dimensions. Hearing Nathaniel's decision to marry Mary, he had left acting and had become a naval officer in order to remain with Nathaniel. He had pre- t'en.ded that hia motives for changing his profession were selfless. But he had tactfully planned to blow off a fuse to murder Nathaniel, when ironically he himself was blown off the ship. He keeps regretting that though he gave the right order 96 in an effort to save the entire ship, he was himself blown off. Thus he blames goodness, without realizing that he was probably late in giving the appropriate command since he was preoccupied with murderous designs at that time. It seems as if this time knowing that he was going to kill a good man, Nature killed him instead and saved this man through Christopher’s ironic intervention. Christopher perceives that his "eating" was not re stricted to sex alone but is of varied nature. He had al ways wanted the best of everything. He had wounded Peter’s leg cleverly just because Peter had a new bike whereas his own was old. He had cheated in an examination by using an eraser-size dictionary. The parts he played as actor were always representative of his ethical nature, such as the role of Greed when his company played the Seven Deadly Sins. He cannot See his ethical nature without being evasive again. He cannot recall what part he played in William Congreve's play The Wav of the World, as if he does not want to see that he is being defeated now just as Fainall is in the drama. It must be Fainall's role with which Christopher shares several similarities, even if there are striking differences too. Though the entire play centers in infidelities, deceptions and love of money, Fainall emerges as the vilest character in the drama as does Christopher in Pincher Martin. Neither Fainall nor Christopher loves anybody except -himself. Fainall marries for money, not 97 for love; he does not care for his mistress either. We saw that Christopher keeps himself uppermost too. Both the characters rationalize their own evil; Fainall justifies his liaisons in his conversation with his mistress Marwood; he argues that cuckoldry is pure since it is born out of the honorable "root" of marriage. Christopher says that he "ate" other people because he was given a mouth to eat (p.197). Further, both men are brought to "confusion." Their exploi tations and plans to exploit boomerang on them. Fainall not only fails to get his wife's and Lady Wishfoot's money, but loses his women too. His opponent Mirabell, on the other hand, gets the wealth and wins Mallamant's love, though he had also loved money and had used women before his love for Millamant had reformed him. There is a very remarkable difference, however, in Fainall and Christopher's situations. Christopher is successful in life and suffers only after his death, whereas Fainall is miserable and understands the basis for his suffering in hid lifetime. Moreover, there are characters in The Way of the World. who are not only ethically better than Fainall but are also stronger than he; the people Christopher exploits are either too weak or too good to control him. The emphasis, in facte, in Christopher's case is balanced between his understanding and his defeat. Besides understan ding his own selfishness, he even becomes aware of the ethical development of his own personality. He finds himself admitting 98 that his situation now is like that of childhood, that he is as much afraid of death and darkness now as he was in childhood: “it’s like those nights when I was a kid, lying awake thinking the darkness would go on for ever. And I couldn't go back to sleep because of the dream of whatever it was in the cellar coming out of the corner." He used to be "defenceless" in the cellar as he saw the ends of coffin, representing his innate and obsessive fear of death (p. 138). The darkness of the cellar is the evil in his "centre." Christopher defines his "centre" as "that which was so nakedly the centre of everything that it could not even examine itself. In the darkness of the skull, it existed, a darker dark, self-existent and indestructible" (p. 45). The "centre" is not only selfish but is also mysteriously capable of destruction, not of'creation: "approach of the unknown thing, a dark centre that turned its back on the thing that created it and struggled to escape" (p. 179). The «centre" 's potential fór destruction is innate: "the cellar door swinging to behind a small child who must go down, down in his sleep, to meet the thing he turned from when he was created" (p. 189). Not only does he understand the relationship between his childhood and adulthood, but also the one in the various stages of his life in between these two periods; "if one went step by step—ignoring the gap of dark and the terror of the lip—back from the rock, through the Navy, the stage, 99 the writing, the university, the school, back to bed under the silen eaves, one went down to the cellar. And the path led back from the cellar to the rock" (p. 173). Recognition of his friends’ understanding is another epistemological transformation in Christopher’s brief sus pended life before his spiritual death. He sees that Nathaniel and Peter were right in asserting that he would suffer if he did not change his evil nature. He recalls a conversation with Nathaniel who had told him that he should reform himself, i.e., he should learn "the technique of dying into heaven," if he does not want his entire being to be annihilated by the "black lightning" (p. 70). He had paid no attention to him then. But now that he has lost his physical life, he is terrified of the black lightning. Peter had also said the same thing in a different way. He had mentioned a Chinese box which symbolizes the sequence by which the weaker are "eaten" by the less weak, the less weak by the stronger and the stronger by the even stronger and so on? now the memory of the Chinese box warns him that his own turn to be "eaten" has come. The process of penetrating his own ethical personality and his friends’ ethical understanding runs parallel with the realization that he is suffering now because he has inflated his self-love, but he cannot leave the obsession. He sees the toy jar as symbolic of his own situation to a degree. He knows that he could float comfortably (symbolically) 100 if he could be small. Ke does become small momentarily, but as soon as he becomes little, there is"more room to distend; so the water-globe grows larger and larger. Ke enlarges in the globe again until he fills it and feels needles and fire jab at him (p. 49). In his life he had done exactly this. With every opportunity to exploit—to inflate—he had exploited. (The red deposit in the water and bis hands—• symbolic of his exploitation—also grow bigger and bigger). Now he understands that by not "expanding" his desire to live, he can be happy, but he cannot stop the "expansion" (p. 103). Above all, he acknowledges thathhis intelligence bas increased his problems and suffering rather than his happiness because of the way he has used it. He knows that "sanity is the ability to appreciate reality" (p. 163) and that he cannot "control" anything as he "deliberately forgot" that he had "died" (p. 172). He recognizes that he is avoiding the truth about his forthcoming spiritual death by taking refuge in madness (pp. 177-178). He admits that he has invented the hallucinations and that he can even explain their details,(pp. 190-191, 194). Thus before annihilation, Christopher undergoes an epistemological transformation by admitting the truth about his death, his intellect, wickedness and development, and about the validity of his friends’ ethical epistemology. But what he does not understand is that he had an opportunity 101 to reform if he had wanted to. What he does not realize is that he defends his own evil nature instead of fighting against it, that he clings to his "identity"—his selfish being as it is—instead of getting away from it: "’If I ate them, who gave me a mouth?*" (p. 197). However, he is keenly aware that he is incapable of answering the above question, but does not know that he is damned because he cannot answer it. Though this epitome of delusion changes epistemologically, the reader feels more enlightened than him, and more than the other characters as well when the point of view shifts to Campbell and Davidson’s in the last chapter. There the reader observes the reactions of these two men to Christopher’s dead body and their epistemological communication. Carrpbell y _ is the man who had found the body and Davidson is an English officer who has come to identify it. Davidson has brought himself to a point where he does not think of dead bodies as anything other than a lifeless thing; speculation on the life of the dead men he identifies is not his concern. But Campbell intuitively senses and insists that dead men suffer and survive. However, there is a definite intercourse between the two men. Davidson intuitively understands that Campbell wants the dead body to be removed soon, because he has unpleasant "dreams." At this point a silent exchange of thoughts begins with their eyes which meet since Campbell 102 leaves his diffidence and takes the courage to communicate with Davidson? Campbell's eyes study Davidson a second time: "Two faces approached each other. Campbell read the face line by line as he had read the lean-to" (p. 206). Again, he looks at Davidson "carefully, eye to eye." This time Davidson nods to acknowledge the possibility that the life belts cause suffering to the dying men by giving them hope. So long as the sun is not set, the two men communicate and Davidson comes to share Campbell's vision partly. But the movements of the sun are ironically towards sinking: the wintry sun becomes "a half-circle in a bed of crimson and slate," and then is "going down—seemingly for ever" (p. 206). After it sinks leaving "nothing for a reminder but clouds like smoke," Davidson refuses to apply the possibility of suffering to Christopher, though he had agreed with Campbell that the possibility in general exists? he argues "logically" that if Christopher did not have time even to kick his seaboots off, he could not have suffered. The reader knows that Davidson is evading the issue and that Campbell is right both about Christopher's survival and his suffering. But even Campbell does not know that Christopher had undergone an epistemological transformation during this time of survival and suffering and that he was annihilated spiritually. ■10^ Chapter V The Spire explores the epistemological change, the evasions and suffering of an obessed man Jocelin, Dean of the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary in medieval England. Preoccupied with the idea of building a spire for his church, Jocelin views people as his instruments and not as individuals. Therefore, the novel centers in one man’s obsession and around his consequent vague view of others. There is no social conflict between Jocelin and the other characters since it is always clear that his strong will power will triumph over weak protests by them; this novel and its discussion can seem dull till one realizes that Golding brilliantly uses the spire as a multifarious epis temological symbol in relation to Jocelin and that the reader, as an outsider, understands even more than Jocelin. Representative throughout of Jocelin's suppressed lust for sexton Pangall’s wife Goody, his faith and pride, at the simplest level the spire is a phallic, religious, and ego istic symbol. It becomes an epistemological symbol as well since Jocelin comes to some understanding of the complex relationships between his obsession, pride, faith and pru rience while building the spire; with every new stage of the building, Jocelin gains "new knowledge." Completely ignorant of the unhappy consequences of 104 building the spire and only aware of the constructive results of finishing it, in the beginning Jocelin is full of excite ment, joy and hope. He believes that it will be a living proof of his faith. He is confident that it will be the "crown and majesty" of his church. If there will be any change, it will be for the better: "Things shall be as they were? only better, richer, the pattern of worship complete at last" (p. 6). Jocelin tells others with certainty that "God will provide" the foundations for the four-hundred-feet high building, including the one-hundred-and-fifty-feet spire. Positive that the "security of the stone ship, the security of her crew" is not in danger (p. 7), Jocelin follows his obsession recklessly? only once does he say that he "must remember that the spire isn't everything!" as if he knows that it will be everything. He ignores the warning that it will endanger the "security" of his "crew." Even when Pangall cautions him against this obsession, Jocelin pays no attention to him. Pangall reminds him that the workers employed by Jocelin to build the spire are murderers and he prophesies that they will kill him (Pangall). He pathetically pleads against the building of a spire on another occasion, but to no avail. With all the three stages in the building—the pit which is dug to ascertain whether the church has sufficiently strong foundations, the erection of the tower and the spire high in the air, and finally the achievement of the spire 105 itself standing precariously—Jocelin’s understanding grows. He gradually begins to realize that the "crew" will not be "secure." Even before any substantial harm comes to any body, Jocelin anticipates the sacrifice of four people in particular, and of himself. He sees—Sexton Pangall and his wife Goody, Roger Mason and his wife Rachel—as four pillars sustaining the weight of the whole structure, and his own strong back holding up the weight of the entire edifice. He "shudders" in anticipating that he will build the spire on the lives of people, and he does actually see others suffer. The workers tease Pangall with obscene jokes. Jocelin is witness to Pangall’s desperate attempt to save himself and he is present near the crossways at the time of Pangall’s murder. He watches Goody and Roger’s misery as they fail to avoid an adulterous relationship. He sees Rachel’s wild anger on learning of her husband’s affair with Goody. Jocelin himself suffers as he sees how dangerous it is to build the spire. When he watches the tower swaying, he makes an effort not to scream or run. When the pillars begin to sing, he feels that, he is undergoing a penance. He goes "through incredulity to a flash of terror" when he realizes that what he had seen as a button in the model spire, is in reality bigger than a milestone and that it has to be hauled ups "The body became a thing of contracted muscles, guivering nerves, that believed the thing would snap those four needles down there like alder sticks," "though the soul 106 had faith" (pp. 144-145). Throughout the novel Jocelin may choose between stop ping the spire or the sufferings. But his is not a real choice as he feels compelled to choose one way to build the spire. Since he can neither be blind to the sufferings any more than he can bring them to an end, he tries to for get that he has seen them or he rationalizes them so that the spire symbolizes this epistemological tension. For in stance, the details of Pangall’s murder torture him con tinually, since he was present at the time of the murder and had earlier assured Pangall that no harm would come to him. So he attempts to believe that Pangall has not died (pp. 75, 84-85, 89-90, 95, 100, 105, 155). He goes to the extent of pretending to himself and then to Goody that Pangall will come back. He climbs up the building, hoping that this would help him forget the murder. He can momentarily ignore the reality by climbing up, but he is also confused and mis erable on remembering the truth; on the one hand, he feels that everything is "clean and new" and he experiences a sense of liberty like a bird (pp. 96-99); on the other hand, even the "unlooked-for things" and those "put aside"—details of the scene before Pangall’s death—swarm at him (p. 100). If he fights a battle between evading and facing the fact about Pangall’s murder, he wavers between realizing and justifying Roger's torment. He knows that Roger suffers to see the dangers of building so high without foundations, 107 but feeling proud that he can use Roger, he exclaims with triumph« "Now, if I told him to build“a thousand feet high, he would do it. I’ve got what I wanted" (p. 134). Jocelin’s process of understanding works on a dual level in relation to Goody as well. On the one hand, he justifies Goody's adulterous relations with Roger and his own indifference? on the other hand, he worries about her and is compelled to interfere. He is aware of the "terrible" thought that he wants the relation to continue as Goody will keep Roger from going away, but he prays to God to give Goody strength to stay away from this rela tionship. He is satisfied to think^) that Goody is "a good woman" and that everybody is responsible for his own salvation? if she is "part of the cost, why so be it" (p. 95). But at the same time he is disturbed to see that she has become a sinner? he must see to her salvation. By sending her to live with an abbess and by paying a large sum of money to the abbess for this purpose, he hopes to make up for promoting her sin. While going through epistemological tension between evasion and understanding, Jocelin does understand ultimate- ¿’ly/ that his "love" is not "good." Particularly by making Goody suffer, he understands that his estimate of the consequences of building the spire was not correct. Because of'.his love for Goody, his heart is pierced with sorrow to see her suffer before her death in childbirth. 108 He cries out for mercy and says that he did not know this was going to happen. And he admits: "This have I done for my true love, ... That seemed to fit the totality of his life” (pp. 131-132). Even after the spire is built, he wishes that there were "some mode of life where all love is good" (p. 206). Jocelin is able to carry the weight of sacrifices made for building the spire because of pride in his religion. He is convinced that since in a vision God had entrusted the job of building the spire to him he must build it under all circumstances. He unconsciously invents the idea of God's angel approving the undertaking. To reinvigorate his faith and to substantiate the idea that what he is doing to himself and to others is right and inevitable, he needs the "guardian angel" sent by God to "comfort" him because he is doing God's work (pp. 17-18): "Thy angel is my security. I can bear anything now" (p. 22). Seeing the four people as sacrificial pillars, he trembles, but consoles himself with the thought that the angel strengthens him (pp. 57-59), by constantly helping him forget his tormented thoughts about others' suffering (pp. 60, 127, 135). One of the major questions Golding faced in conceiving this novel is that of religious-mystic vision—the problem of the validity of angelic visitations and visions. When is a religious vision a true one and when is it false? 109 In the Catholic tradition, one just has to wait until the Church at Rome decides—in the case of•Our Lady of Fatima, the Virgin supposedly appeared to some peasant girls on a hillside in Spain, and the Church has ruled that it really was the Virgin. There are other cases in which the Church has ruled the opposite. In Jocelin’s case, when the Inquisition terminates his services as the Dean of the Church, it evidently decides that his vision is not true. ca the other hand, as in Bible, Jocelin performs a miracle which is his proof that the vision is reliable. In numerous stories of the Bible, in order to take a vigo rous and direct hand in human affairs, God is shown expre ssing His will in a way that is understandable to human beings, one of the ways being the pronouncements of reli gious leaders, prophets, and mystics. God is supposed to have presented himself to Moses as a burning bush, which did not consume itself, and a voice is said to have spoken out of the bush to Moses, telling him to go to Egypt and to free the captive Israelites. But if Moses was alone when he saw the burning bush, how could he convince the whole tribe that he was favored by God's will. He did so by miracles, as did Christ—turning a wooden rod into a snake. In similar sense, Jocelin proves that his vision is true by achieving the miracle of making the spire stand without foundations. The question, then, is—is Jocelin's vision false 110 because the Inquisition from Rome declares it to be so or is it true because the Dean performs a-miracle of faith? Is Jocelin’s vision religious when the consequences of implementing it are so destructive and different from those anticipated in the vision? Or is it false even though,the spire stands exactly as the vision foretold? The question, especially in the Twentieth century, when science and psy chology have advanced, is: does it represent true reli gious faith or just repressed sexual desires? Is it God speaking to Jocelin personally, or is it his own pride? The same type of question arises about angelic visitaion. How can we be sure that an angel is an angel and is not tuberculosis of the spine, sexual hysteria, madness, or auto-suggesion? Jocelin himself explores the epistemological question about the validity of his vision. Since he brings misery to other people, his attitude towards faith becomes ambiva lent; he knows that in spite of every sacrifice, the spire stands, but he realizes that the spire is not an act of faith alone sine® it is an "ugly" thing, nothing like his vision in which it was to be the "crown and majesty" of the Church/ Jocelin’s understanding about his faith and obsession is less remarkable than about his prurience and pride intricately "mixed up" with his "true" vision. When the action of the novel begins, Jocelin is at least aware that he is obsessed with the idea of building the spire on faith. But he is Ill completely deluded about his prurience and false pride, because in his past he had convinced himself that he had successfully controlled his lust for Goody and that God had made him humble. In the beginning, he believes that the church is "like a man lying on his back" (p. 4), and that he himself is a surgeon: "NOw I lay a hand on the very body of my church. Like a surgeon, I take my knife to the stomach drugged with poppy" (p. 9). But later he dreams that he himself lies on his back, and that he punishes himself. Before his death, he feels as if he is himself drugged with poppy and not the church. Warnings from others about his pride do not awaken him in the beginning. Dumb man Gilbert, by imitating an eagle's flight through his gestures, and by carving Jocelin's nose like an eagle's beak on the stones for gargoyles, tries to tell Jocelin that he Is proud, but he thinks that the dumb man is not copying his actual appearance and that the dumb man will "strain" his "humility" by considering him to be an angel. Jocelin admires his wisdom at this time but without really understanding and appreciating it (pp. 19-20). On climbing up the spire, he observes his reflection in the metal sheet, thinks it is somebody else, but finally recognizes it to be his own image. Jocelin's appearance here is exactly like the dumb man's representation of it. Similarly he ignores a deacon's comment on his pride, thinking that the 112 deacon is talking about somebody else. But having suffered and having lost his position as the dean of the church, he acknowledges his pride. He admits that as soon as he says that bis spire is the highest prayer, he would be struck by the "dark angel." He had never said dark "angel" before, but had thought that the angel was sent by God to strengthen him. Now he is frightened of the angel as if he realizes that his faith is intermingled with the darkness of his pride. Jocelin acknowledges his lust for Goody even more clearly than his pride, though he tries to evade the knowledge. He tries to believe that Goody is his "daughter in God" but he watches her "with love and a little disappointment" (p. 7). He looks down upon his Aunt Alison’s sexual sins, as if he were a dean pure in mind and heart: “one must be charitable, as always—even to such as she is? or has been" (p. 22). He evades the fact that he is compromising with her sins by using money earned from such sins for building the spire, in return for a promise to give her a grave next to the High Altar (pp. 22-23). While criticizing others for their impropriety or sins, he is horrified to discover his own lust vividly. He is shocked'at Rachel's "violated pricacy" in explaining to him why she and Roger had no child, but ironically, he is faced with his own lust at this very moment: "Then Zany struck him in the groin with the pig's bladder so that he jerked out a laugh that ended in a shudder." Now shocked at himself, he cries out loud: 113 11 'Filthl Filthl"* But on observing that Pangall heard him "in a half-conscious effort to make his words logical and to hide their true source, Jocelin cried out again. 'The place is filthy dirty1'" (p. 55). Lust seems to Jocelin like Satan who should be defeated by the power of the angel—his religious pride. Twice his angel successfully defeats Satan (pp. 59, 70-71). But soon the angel cannot triumph over Satan: "after a visit by the angel—as if to keep him in his humility— Satan was given leave to torment him, seizing him by the loins, so that it became indeed an unruly member" (p. 133). After driving the nail into the spire—the nail which is not only a symbol of faith but also of sex —Jocelin is not afraid of Satan's visits and has, therefore, an imaginary union with Goody's body: His angel had left him, and the sweetness of this devil was laid on him like a hot hand. ... Then the devil drew near over the grass, ... In this uncountry there was blue sky and light, consent and no sin. She came towards him baked in her red hair. She was smiling and humming from an empty mouth. He knew the sounds explained everything, removed all hurt and all conceal ment for this was the nature of the uncountry. He could not see the devil's face, for this was the nature of the uncountry too? but he knew she was there, and moving towards him totally as he was moving towards her. Then there was a wave of ineffable good sweetness, wave after wave, and an atonement (pp. 170-171). 22 The nâil is probably presumed to be one of those from the cross on which Christ died, one of many such relics in the medieval church? the very act of driving the nail into the spire, besides the indication that the Bishop himself might be sexually corrupt, makes it a sexual symbol. 114 This imaginary sexual union breaks one of Jocelin’s delusions. In order to hide his "hurt" because of Goody’s indifference, Jocelin had used the dumb man as a substitute for Goody. He had bestowed his love on him. He had thought that the dumb man, uplike Goody responds to his love (pp. 93- 94). He was overjoyed to think that the dumb man shielded him from the mob with his own body to save his life at the time of Pangall’s murder. So at the time of union with Goody, the dumb man is replaced by her? Goody is "smiling and humming from an empty mouth" like the dumb man (p. 171) and the dumb man, when we meet him soon after, is "not even humming" (p. 173). Besides acknowledging his lust for Goody, Jocelin admits that he had vicariously married Goody to inpotent Pangall in the past (pp. 121, 132, 135, 205), and that there is a causal connection between his lust and the spire: "perhaps it's a diagram of the folly they don’t know about" (p. 123). He who was trying to hide his own lust even from himself, cannot conceal it even from Goody. She notices it and says "Not you tool" Without naming Goody, he admits his feelings towards her beforebthe Inquiry Commission (pp. 159-160)? he acknow ledges them before his Aunt (p. 179) and Roger (p, 205). His understanding is as clear as it can be when he says to Roger: "After all the bogus sanctity, to be bewitched by a dead woman" (p. 201). Thus the spire is an ambivalent symbol of Jocelin’s 115 ethical being: his weakness and strength, his obsession and determination, his prurience and holiness, his recklessness and love, his pride and humility, and his Satan and angel. It is also an ambivalent epistemological symbol, representing both Jocelin’s evasions and his understanding of his dual nature. The change in his understanding is paralleled by a change in Jocelin’s nature itself since this proud cleric becomes epistemologically humble to a great extent. He who was sure in the beginning that he knew everything about himself, others and the spire, admits that he was ignorant before he built the spire: "I thought it would be simple. I thought the spire would complete a stone bible, be the apocalypse in stone. I never guessed in my folly that there would be a new lesson at every level, and a new power. Nor could I have been told. I had to build in faith, against advice" (p. 103). He compares himself to a mayfly which has to learn as it lives. Ironically, by the time be knows himself to a considerable degree he realizes that he does not "really know" himself. He understands the complexity of his nature, which he had thought was simple? going to meet Roger ostensibly to ask for forgiveness, be knows that he is making this- overture for several confused and unrelated reasons. This epistemological humility can also be seen in the relationship with several characters, his confessor sacrist 116 Anselm, his Aunt, Chaplain Adam and the dumb man. He had considered them inferior to himself in.the beginning of the novel now he is humble. At first, Jocelin was impatient with Father Anselm but later he patiently listens to his criti cism, reminding him that Jocelin’s promotions in church ranks were due to the King with whom his Aunt had illicit relations and not because of any individual merit nor by God’s grace. He requests his Aunt, whom he had treated as an object of pity and as a supplier of money, to help him understand why he "bewitched" by Goody. He asks Father Adam (whom he had called ’’Father Anonymous ? before) for help. He becomes receptive to the dumb man’s insight also. Before Pangall’s death, the dumb man had "even laid a hand on Jocelin to pullihim" (p. 72) and had gone to the crossways (where Pangall is murdered soon after)? without Jocelin but Jocelin had not realized that the dumb man intuitively knew that Pangall would be killed at the crossways? the dumb man did not insist, as if he knew that Jocelin was not ready to "listen" to him. But after Jocelin has observed Pangall and Goody’s death and Roger and Rachel’s sufferings, this dumb man does not have to pull him? Jocelin intuitively appreciates the dumb man’s wisdom. The dumb man guides him to the crossways to a hole he had made in one of the pillars of the building, and Jocelin understands what he means? so he performs the ritual of giving himself—his body—to the spire? thrusting an iron probe into the hole—symbolie of 117 his strong will—he says: "build me in with the rest of them" (p. 181). Epistemological appraisal of these people by Jocelin is not unrealistic. He seeks help from his Aunt and the dumb man only in the areas stated above. And he realizes that Father Adam is unable to unravel Jocelin’s evil and that he is too devout a Christian to understand the pagans and the importance of seeking forgiveness from them (p. 195). Jocelin’s estimate of Father Anselm’s limitations as a con fessor (p. 135) comes out to be true as well. Father Anselm's anger, hatred, jealousy and hurt pride burst out when Jocelin tries to communicate with him? therefore, he is incapable of being an understanding and sympathetic confes sor. Jocelin's attitude towards people he had considered either as his instruments or lesser than himself changes for the better. He asks for forgiveness from Roger, whom he had treated as an instrument and from sacrist Anselm whom he had ignored in favor of the spire. He who had attempted to forget others' misery and had thought that God is with him, understands that God "lies" with people: "If I could go back, I would take God as lying between people and to be found there"—Jocelin thinks (p. 212). Heaven means nothing to him "unless" he goes "holding" Goody and Pangall with him. When the question about Jocelin's salvation is raised 118 at the very end of the novel, the answer is ambivalent. The change in Jocelin's personality for the better gives some hope for his salvation whereas his recklessness in relation to others, raises doubts about it. Jocelin's personality, work and epistemology are all ambivalent in nature so is the possibility of bis salvation mixed in nature. At the very beginning of the novel this conflict is indicated to the reader when Jocelin's face is described to have "a glory of sunlight through painted glass"—a glory that has both the quality of consuming and exalting. Graham Greene's Scobie in The Heart of the Matter comes to mind while discussing the question of Jocelins salvation. Scobie and Jocelin are acutely aware that their religion demands that they have no prurient relations with women. Both feel guilty, Jocelin because he becomes aware of his lust for Goody, and scobie because he haS adulterous rela tions with Helen. Jocelin avoids the confession? Scobie, under the pressure of his wife Louise, goes to confession without changing the Course of his life. Yet the hope of salvation is not denied to them. Unlike completely selfish Christopher in Pincher Martin, they are not damned, as they radiate with the beauty of compassion even at the time when they are hurting others ? they are too sympathetic towards others to make them suffer without suffering themselves. Their lives are constructive as well as destructive, therefore. Scobie's relationship with Helen and his unlawful help to 119 several people make him a lovable character. Jocelin's spire is a living evidence of his faith and brings with it not only new life and ethical change for the better, but also new knowledge for Jocelin. The spire becomes a symbol of ambivalence in Jocelin’s personality, understanding and dalvation and of changes in his personality and understanding. Ironically, in Jocelin’s vision (when he was completely deluded about himself) the s spire is such a symbol? Jocelin had seen it as an epistemo logical symbol but without realization: "I had seen the whole building as an image of living, praying man. But inside it was a richly written book to instruct that man“ (p. 185). It represented Jocelin’s personality also. He V had seen a feeling rise from his heart, v which'’"reached up until at the utmost.tip it burst into a living fire" (p. 184). Rachel, who is Jocelin’s foil character23 sums up the significance of the spire when she quotes words spoken by Roger's old master "’a spire goes down as far as it goes up— The depths Jocelin had suppressed, spring up with the spire Jocelin hides, Rachel is frank and outspoken in sexual matters, but this irritates Jocelin (pp. 39, 41). Though she is^not proud, she challenges Jocelin’s pride (pp. 38, 39). With her open acknowledgment of sex and lack of pride, she belongs to earth whereas Jocelin aspires to heights, denying the earthly life of sex. Heights are "a real purgatory to her;” so she never climbs up the building (p. 105)? Jocelin enjoys heights (p. 109) and is the only one who climbs highest up, the building when he fixes the nail on it. Hence Jocelin’s aversion to Rachel and the ironical significance of her words. 120 going up. Jocelin himself perceives this when he defines his mind as a "building with a vast cellarage where rats live; ... the cellarage knew about him—knew he was impo tent, I mean—and arranged the marriage" (pp. 202, 205). Rachel also inadvertently points out the consequences of building the spire when she adds that her husband’s old master had meant that "there has to be as much weight under a building as there is over it" (p. 39). Jocelin understands this when he asks Roger what holds the spire up—-Roger, Goody, Pangall, the nail, or Jocelin himself? (p. 204). Indeed it is all these people’s sufferings, Jocelin's faith, pride and love which hold the spire. Jocelin's insight of the apple tree later echoes Rachel's perceptive description of the spire: "bursting up with cloud and scatter, laying hold of the earth and the air. a fountain, a marvel, an apple tree" (p. 196, italics mine). His last words of perception, immediately befonerhis death, brilliantly summarize Jocelin's understanding of his own ethical and epistemological being:"It's like the apple tree!" Chapter VI Unlike the four protagonists discussed earlier, Sammy Mountjoy of Free Fall consciously tries to understand "the unnameable, unfathomable and invisible darkness that sits at the centre of him, always awake, always different from what you believe it to be, always thinking and feeling what you can never know it thinks and feels, that hopes hopeless ly to understand and to be understood" (p. 8). More specifically, middle aged Sammy seeks to answer two ques tions regarding the development of his personality—first, to point out the time when he lost his freedom? second, to understand how he lost it. Determined to understand himself, Sammy discards those ways of understanding which, he thinks, would limit his knowledge. He is a painter, but he would not exclusive ly rely on his art: "I want to understand. ... My art is not enough for me. To hell with my art. The fit takes me out of a deep well as does the compulsion of sex. ... Living is like nothing because it is everything—is too sub tle and copious for unassisted thought. Painting is like a single attitude, a selected thing" (p. 7). Like pointing, the systems of ideas and values, such as the Marxist, the Christian and the rationalist approaches to man's being, are epistemologically limited though for differ ent reasons? they are like "useless" hats that "do not fit." 122 Sanimy says: “They come in from outside, they are suggested patterns some dull and some of great beauty. But I have lived enough of my life to require a pattern that fits everything I know; and where shall I find that?" (p. 6). He thinks that he will not be able to understand himself by "reorganizing" his "memories until they make sense," since "the mind cannot hold more than so much, but under standing requires a sweep that takes in the whole of remember ed time and then can pause." Rejecting thought, art and conventional systems as exclusive means of understanding man, Sammy decides to write his story: "Perhaps if I write my story as it appears to me, I shall be able to go back and select" (p. 7). Sammy's sincere desire to understand is also evident from his amazing awareness of possible epistemological limitations in his own personality, his ethical weakness, for example: "I lie. I deceive myself as well as you" (p. 13). Second, he is afraid that his developed mind may create problems, since he may "elaborate out of" his "adult hindsight" (p.50). In order not to be "deceived" by Sammy the reader must often choose between Sammy's statements about himself and the actual presentation of his life, and between his present and prospective under standing. The reader’s analysis will involve a great many quotations from the novel, to show ambivalence and incoherence in Sammy's understanding, and to present it some- 123 what coherently. In Sammy's present opinion, infant and boy Sammy are entirely different: "There is a gap between the pictures of Sammy Mountjoy with Johnny and Philip. One was a baby and the other a boy? but the steps have vanished. They are two different people" (p. 47). Insisting that his childhood differs completely from his middle age, he says: "I can love the child in the garden, on the airfield, in Rotten Row, the tough little boy at school because he is not I. He is another person" (p. 46). He believes that he cannot experience the bliss of infancy now? he "can no longer feel" the "happiness or pain" of his childhood (p. 70j_? and the inability to relive the distant past applies to his experience in the cell, an incident from his recent past. Similarly, Sammy says that his present guilt has no kin-fehip with his childhood guilt? if child Sammy "had murdered," middle aged Sammy "should feel no guilt, not even responsibility" (pp. 46-47). In the future, however, Sammy hopes to see the connections in the various stages of his life: "Perhaps, reading my story through again I shall see the connection between the little boy, clear as spring water, and the man like a stagnant pool. Somehow, the one became the other" (p. 9). The reader is exactly in the situation Sammy hopes to be in. Change in Sammy's personality from infancy to middle age can be explained in terms of his inheritance and development» 124 in terms of his "being" and "becoming." Twice Sammy inaccurately suggests that his guilt can be described either as inevitable or chosen: "the smell either inevi table or chosen came later" (p. 78); "either" he "had been born without this natural generosity or" he “had lost it somewhere" (p. 191). But at other times he perceives the reality more clearly when he shows that it is a paradoxi cal problem and not one of alternatives: one time he argues that he “had trapped" himself (p. 81) and another time that he "cannot be blamed for the mechanical and helpless reaction of" his "nature?" he says: "what I was, I had become" (p. 131). That Sammy is inherently innocent as well as wicked comes out from the fact that his moral being is in between those of good Johnny Spragg and Nick Shales on the one hand and Philip on the other. Comparing his childhood friend Johnny to himself, he says: "I understood how there had been in him what had been missing in me? namely a natural goodness and generosity so that even his sins were pecadilloes because all the time the root of the matter was in him" (pp. 190-191). In his prepared speech to his science teacher Nick, Sammy says: "you were innocent, you were good and innocent like Johnny Spragg, blown to pieces five miles above his own county of Kent. You and he could live in one world at a time. You were not caught in the terrible net where we guilty ones are forced to 125 torture each other" (p. 250). By contrast, his friend Philip, even as a child, "liked to inflict pain and a catastrophe was his orgasm," because he "was fitted to survive in this modern world as a tapeworm in an intes tine" (pp. 48-49). "He was far more dangerous" than every- body else (p. 48). * Sammy puts his theology teacher Miss Pringle and himself in the middle of Johnny and Nick on one side and Philip on the other: "we were two of a kind, that is all. . . . Philip Arnold is a minister of the crown and handles life as easy as breathing. But we are neither the innocent nor the wicked. We are the guilty" (p. 251). Indeed whenever Sammy commits a sin, he feels guilty. Unlike Philip, he cannot enjoy evil completely in his childhood? he does not mind hurting small boys but dislikes robbing their fag cards. The head teacher makes him "conscious" of his guilt. Next, when the verger hits him for defiling the altar Sammy thinks: "As I saw the truth the adult world had hit me good and proper for a deed that I knew conscious ly was daring and wrong. Hazily and in pictures more than in thoutht I saw my punishment to have been nicely graded. 24 Douglas M. Davis, "A Conversationwith Golding," The New Republic, CXLVIII (May 1963), p. 28? replying to a question whether "Salinger's youths are too good to be real," Golding said; "I don't think so. Most boys at the age he writes about are uncorrupted. This isn't innocent goodness, mind. This is merely a rather enviable state of suspension—a pre lude, if you will—between the adult and the youthful worlds." 126 I spat at the altar, had meant to pee on it. My mind flinched away from the possibilities of what might have happened if I had not been three times before we reached the church'' (p. 75). In youth, even when he triuirphs to watch Beatrice's sexual submission, he feels ashamed to see her frightened like a "victim" and does not want to be her "executioner." "On being bored" by her, he begins to be extremely "cold" towards her, but he is "just not callous enough to get away with it;" he avoids looking into her eyes at the time for he is "ashamed" to see fear in them (p. 127). Though Sammy deserts her, on knowing her consequent suffering, he feels as if he is being "stabbed" with "a knife." Sammy's choices can be explained partly in terms of his being "guilty" by inheritance; his development is both in the direction of good and evil, depending on the growth of his emotions and on the change of his environment. He argues that in his infancy., , "there was no guilt," and "there was "a new knowledge" that he could take any one of the two paths; he says: "there was nothing to draw me down one more than the other. I danced down one for joy in the taste of potatoes. I was free. I had chosen" (pp. 5-6). Sammy does not realize that in childhood, in reality he had no chance to demonstrate his "power to choose," since he is not yet torn between guilt and sexual attraction (p. 219). His environment is neither corrupt nor corrupting; his friend Evie’s fantasies of being rich and of becoming 127 a boy are not harmful. Kis mother is the "unquestionable, the not good, not bad, not kind, not bitter. . . . She neglects but she does not warp or exploit" (p. 15). The quarrels between his mother and Mrs Donovan do not reveal illwill? both become friends like children and together try to cure Sammy's hurt ear. Hence Sammy himself realizes later that as a child he had no choice: "what choice had he?" (p. 131). In his slum—the Rotten Row, Sammy is "a clear bubble blown about, vulnerable but unwounded" (p. 91). After going to the elementary school, he begins to lose his innocence, though not by his own choice yet? his corrupt friend Philip "chooses" him, since "living near the toughest of the lot he was protected. Since he was so close, I could not run after him and my hunting reflexes were not triggered off" (p. 49). Philip knows exactly how to manipulate Sammy to get the response he wants. After "weaving himself nearer and round" Sammy, he gets Sammy to rob fagcards from little boys by arguing that they cannot make use of them and by "rubbing in" Sammy’s poverty. When Sammy is caught, humiliated, and isolated for robbing fag- cards, Philip stays away from him cautiously? coming back to Sammy, though only when he is safe, he wins over his gratitude, since Sammy is "so lonely." Next, Philip wants him to defile the altar? so he prepares him by stressing the fact that Sammy’s baptism will be conditional since he is a bastard. Then he constantly challenges Sammy’s boldness 128 to defile the altar. Philip's influence on Sammy's life is so strong that Sammy says: "I thought he had become my henchman but really he was my Machiavelli" (p. 49); "glory" is Sammy's but he is Philip's "clay;" no body "altered" his life "as Philip altered it" (p. 47). Unfortunately, since the adults do not understand that Philip is behind Sammy's mischiefs, no action is taken to control Philip. His head teacher humiliates Sammy but "he knew nothing about Philip and found out nothing. ... never came within a mile of understanding his children" (p. 52) Father Anselm ignorantly and indirectly arouses Philip's defiance against church by not realizing the possible effect on a child like Philip of his sermon on punishment for evil. Father Watts-Watt, interrogating Sammy for defiling the altar, thinks that only a roan can suggest such an idea to Sammy; it never occurs to him that Philip is the "man." Sammy intuitively knows that the adults would ask "pointless" and "unanswerable" questions because of the difference they maintain between their own pretentious goodness and the children's bad deeds, as if they themselves were never like the children they are interrogating so righteously (pp. 65-66) . In his pre-adolescence, Sammy makes his first "conscious" choice, which is of mixed nature, because he chooses the good but rejects the spiritual. He observes Miss Pringle’s cruelty and hypocrisy. Since she is jealous of his talent, his innocence and of his living with Father Watts-Watt, 129 whom she loves, she imagines an obscene scene in Sammy's drawing, makes him sit separately from the other boys arid sees to it that he is humiliated by the head teacher? she "crucifies" Sammy, but while she talks about Christ’s crucifixion, there is "every evidence in her voice of sorrow for human cruelty and wickedness" (p. 210). For Nick it is impossible to be cruel? regarding children as human beings, he treats them "with serious attention indistinguishable from courtesy" and earnestly respects their rights without showing "a verbal respect" (p. 211). Nick wears dirty clothes but his soul is pure? Miss Pringle remains immaculate in her appearance but is cruel. Having seen the contrasted results of the natures of his two teachers, Sammy chooses the rational and the good over the spiritual and the wicked though he feels a kinship with the spiritual world? I believe that my child's mind was made up for me as a choice between good and wicked fairies. Miss Pringle vitiated her teaching. She failed to convince, not by what she said but what,she was. Nick persuaded me to his natural scientific universe by what he was, not by what he said. I hung for an instant between two pictures of the universe? then the ripple passed over the burning bush and I ran towards my friend. In that moment a door closed behind me. I was not to knock on that door again, until in a Nazi prison camp I lay huddled against it half crazed with terror and despair (p. 217). Sammy's attitude towards sex changes with his age. 130 finally leading to his conscious choice of evil. As a Small boy, he stays away from girls. Then he begins to see one of them, Beatrice, as heavenly: "I saw in her face what I can neither describe or draw" (p. 221). Next, his attitude towards sex is ambivalent; in his "too suscep tible mind sex dressed itself in gorgeous colours, brilliant and evil" (p. 231). Yet, he does not decide to seduce Beatrice recklessly. The adults play a destructive role though they evidently do not mean to. His teachers Miss Manning and Mr Carew’s adulterous affair sets a bad example for him. Sammy gathers up his courage and goes to Nick to seek help. But Nick lets him down for "the first time in his life" by saying that sex is dirty. The way Sammy reacts to Nick, puts the blame on Sammy, however: "Guilty am I; therefore wicked I will be" (p. 232). After Nick and his headmaster’s advice that he should get whatever he wants without giving importance to the sacrifices he has to make, he reaches the decision. Sammy’s own part in deciding is important as he ignores the headmaster’s addendum to the advice; he tells Sammy that though he can get what he wants, "what you get is never quite what you thought and sooner or later the sacrifice is regretted" (p. 235). This is the point when Sammy says he loses his freedom (p. 236), but not completely? when he is actually going to see Beatrice, he says that he "was no longer free," but corrects himself and remarks? "No. I was not entirely 131 free. Almost but not quite" (p. 79) because he still has the opportunity to stop; he can still think that "a few days and the feelings would sear themselves out" (p. 80). But when he goes ahead in spite of these thoughts, his choice is fully made and his freedom is lost. The effect of this choice on Sammy is bad because it ends his ability to choose good in relation to Beatrice; after seducing her, he inevitably makes the next choice of deserting her; he sees her sufferings like those of a cat that is half-killed but he "could not kill the cat to stop it suffering" since he "had lost" his "power to choose;" he "had given away" his "freedom" (p. 131). Sammy still has the power to choose good in another area. The results of his next choice, a selfless one, are epistemologically rewarding for him. Taken a prisoner by the Germans in the Second World War, Sammy is interrogated by psychologist Kalde, who is Sammy's double since his choice of handling prisoners instead of teaching at the university weighs on his conscience. Halde knows that Sammy chooses better than he when from the alternatives of telling Kalde which twenty-five men "might actually try to escape" or of being thrown into a dark cell, Sammy prefers the latter even at the risk of torture. Kalde wants Sammy to look into himself in order to betray his friends, but Sammy looks into himself to be redeemed of his ignorance. Therefore, unlike Philip, who "knew about people" (p. 49), 132 "the Herr Doctor does not know about peoples’ (p. 253). Kalde is not an Iago. A confrontation with the unknown dark, though Sammy has always feared it, opens up doors of knowledge for him, since he is also "the creature of discovery." As a small child he is deeply interested in the mysterious, symbolized by the lodger in his mother's house. The lodger "always seemed to be looking at something that was not there, something of profound interest and anxiety" (p. 24)? when he does not get a chance to touch the lodger's moustache, which is like swan's feathers, he is disappointed as "The shape of life loomed that I was insufficient for our lodger's thatch, for that swan-white seal of ultimate knowing" (p. 29). If Sammy is interested in the "ultimate" knowledge during his childhood, in youth, being a member of the Communist party, he is "disciplined and directed to undertake some self-examination" (p. 89). His first decision as a result of self-analysis is to be honest with Beatrice and the second one is to keep her away from the Communist parfj* so that she does not have to first go to bed with Comrade Alsopp. Though Sammy wants to know, as he grows older and becomes more and more aware of what he does not know, his fear of the unknown increases. In his infancy, he is un familiar with the complicated world outside his slum. The only time he is frightened of the unknown'—the lodger's 133 death—-he goes to his mother and feels secure. , But when he moves in with his guardian Father Watts-Watt, he has to take the foetal position, as if innocence ("for in the womb we are immersed completely," p. 155) would defend him "in this wholly not-understood milieu, among these strange powerful people;" he is "utterly and helplessly alone for the first time in darkness and a whirl of ignorance" (pp. 155-157). In his thirties, thrown in the cell, Sammy Says that at first he assumes a foetal position: "I got my knees up against my chin and put my crossed arms before my face. I was defended" (p. 168). But he must face darkness, must probe into "every corner" of his "interior world!! He attempts to interpret his center, symbolized by the damp mopping cloth (which leaves a stain like a brain, where the darkness, the "centre" lives), at the center of the cell, which is a broom closet in reality. Sammy imagines the center to be "the dead thing inside" like a frozen foetus, like the lodger’s dead body* like a curled up snake—deprived of "softness," stinking like a piece of decaying flesh from a misused body. Thus the dark cell symbolizes Sammy’s inner self which is cold, dead and decaying as it has misused Beatrice’s body. In the cell he recalls the incident about Minnie, a girl in his elementary school, urinating on the inspectress’s shoes, symbolically holding the adult world responsible for her senility? by remembering the Minnie incident Sammy is foreshadowing 134 Beatrice's urination on his shoes, representing his respon sibility for her madness. After the cell experience Sammy sees Beatrice in a new light. His paintings serve as. a means to his understand ing; looking at them, he remembers the truth. "Her nun-like innocence" that he had interpreted as her impotence, he "now" sees as her "obedient avoidance of the deep and muddy pool where others lived" (p. 112). The mistake of forgetting Beatrice's spiritual being dawns on him: That negative personality,.that clear absence of being, that vacuum which I had finally deduced from her silences, I n'ow saw to have been full. Just as the substance of the living cell comes shining into focus as you turn the screw by the microscope, so I now saw that being of Beatrice which had once shone out of her face. She was simple and loving and generous and humble; qualities which have no political importance and do not commonly bring their owners much success (p. 191). Sammy had thought that he was "harmless" and that he wanted to "worship" Beatrice, but he remembers "now" that at the time of sexual intercourse they "never met face to face." He "could not paint her face," "but her body" he painted (pp. 121-123). When he finds Taffy with whom he can have mutually satisfying relations, he "no longer" desires "to have" Beatrice. Sammy understands why his decision to seduce Beatrice started his "monstrous consciousness" of guilt. Child Sammy's sins, he says, are "forgiven," but not those of 135 adult Sammy. The middle aged Sammy cannot be forgiven for having contributed to innocent Beatrice’s insanity. He realizes the beauty of forgiveness, but he knows that he cannot receive its Something to forgive is a purer joy than geometry. ... It is a positive act of healing, a burst of light. It is real and precise as aesthetic enjoyment, not weak or soft but crystalline and strong. It is the sign and seal of adult stature, like that man who reached out both arms and gathered the spears into his own body. But innocence does not recognize an injury and that is why the terrible sayings are true. An injury to the innocent cannot be forgiven because the innocent cannot' forgive what they do not understand as an injury. This too I understand as a bit of natural history. I guess the nature of our universe is such that the strong and crystalline adult :.action heals a wound and takes away a scar not out of today but out. of the future. The wound that might have gone on bleeding and suppurating becomes healthy flesh* the act is as if it had never been. But how can the innocent understand that? (pp. 74-75). This insight into forgiveness is Samn^s distinct achieve ment. But Sammy does not believe that to understand. ¿11 "is to pardon all" since "who but the injured can forgive an injury? And how if the lines at that particular exchange are dead?" (p. 9). Therefore, child Sammy could not forgive the verger for hurting his ear. Sammy also understands that "forgiveness must not only be given but received also." He had meant to tell Miss Pringle that he had forgiven her, but she is too "deceived" either to ask for forgiveness or to receive it when given unasked. 136 3ut Sammy's understanding is important though it can not make up for his evil choice? to a ‘degree it opens up avenues to his redemption. Hence the importance of symbolic doors in the novel—Sammy closing the door on spirituality (p. 217), and choosing the better "exit" than Halde (p. 151). His understanding is transformed after his last choice and is enhanced after coming out of the door of Dr Enticott's office (p. 249)? for the first time he realizes that his seduction of Beatrice was not completely harmful as he had thought? it had delayed Beatrice's insanity. Like Angus Wilson’s Gerald Middleton in Anglo Saxon Attitudes Sammy is redeemed from his past as much as is possible for him. Gerald clarifies the historical confusion about the Eorpowld tomb, which in turn helps him leave his family and mistress, who tie him to an unhappy past. Sammy's task .is harder but he does clarify Some confusion about his own person ality and some ethical issues. Both men start their life anew, but Sammy must always bear the burden of his unfor givable sin. Indeed the paradox of Sammy's understanding lies in the fact that he must experience conscious evil before he can consciously understand evil. Ke must pass through darkness to receive light. The loss of freedom is the price for "a new mode of knowing" (p. 133). A corollary of this paradox is that the state of innocence is perhaps not better than the state of guilt, responsibility, crime 137 and loss of freedom since "Perhaps consciousness and the guilt which is unhappiness go together; and heaven is truly the Buddhist Nirvana" (p. 78). Chapter VII The Pyramid is Golding’s first novel to use social comedy. The only other work where he has used the comic on a large scale is his The Brass Butterfly, a play version of his short story "Envoy Extraordinary," The Pyramid is "just" a growing up book of a normal young man rather than the chaos in the society of pre-adolescent boys, violence to and extinction of a gentle human race, the death throes of selfish egoist, the anguish of wicked yet humane priest, or the aching conscience of slum-born artist. The characters in the otherrGolding novels learn under the above tragic situations but Oliver matures in the secure but snobbish society of a small town of Stilbourne that has comedy and pathos but no "real" tragedy. Writing his story in three sections, Oliver sees farce in the auto incidents of the first section and comedy mingled pathos in those of the third section. Robert Ewans from the highest class is on the mercy of middle class Oliver; having stuck his two-seater (which really belongs to music teacher Miss Dawlish) into a pond after having relations with Evie, a girl from the lowest class, Robert’s reputation depends on Oliver’s help to get the auto out of the pond; but he ridiculously asserts his superiority. In the third section, Miss Dawlish from the highest class, 139 but like a child, deliberately gets her two-seater stuck, in order to get some attention from garage man Henry, who does not satisfy her sexual needs. The middle section is humorously satirical. Coming back to his home town from Oxford at the time when the activities of its Opera Society, represented by middle class people, are in full swing, Oliver objectively presents the bickering and petty quarrels amongst the members of the Society. The Society has hired a director Evelyn De Tracy; on the one hand Oliver’s mother and Norman Claymore (editor of the local newspaper and the husband of Imogen, the girl Oliver is infatuated with) want Evelyn’s admiration? on the other hand they enforce their own opinions as if they know more than Evelyn. Oliver says that the desire "to show off and impress," "brought to full flower the jealousies and hatreds, meannesses and indignations we were forced to conceal in ordinary life" (p. 94). Art thus ironically serves the purpose of releasing and purging the emotions of the members. Zest for art is overridden by conscious ness of class differences, the ridiculousness of which is evident from the fact that the Society would not consider including Evie Babbacombe, the town crier's daughter, in their activities. The members of the Society do not consider Evie’s attractiveness and talent and lack of these qualities in themselves as valid reasons for including her even in a chorus, since they do not want to cross the "invisible line" 140 of distinctions. For the first time Oliver does not only observe his people from the outside as it were, but also hears them criticized in strong but honest words by Evelyn, who dislikes Oliver's mother and points out the "smouldered" contempt in his father? in his opinion Imogen is vain, stupid and insensitive whereas Oliver's mother idealizes her like a princess. She does not even know that Evelyn is a homosexual and that Oliver is being exposed to danger. Somehow, Oliver's innocence saves him? he is impressed by the affection, friendliness, and gentleness in Evelyn's manner, but does not understand Evelyn even when he notices that Evelyn's knees open up and shake abnormally, and even though Evelyn shows his own photographs in which he is dressed as a woman. However, Oliver responds to Evelyn's insight into the Stilbournians? when Oliver insists that Evelyn help him understand life, Evelyn, knowing intuitively that Oliver is infatuated with Imogen, tells him to listen to the Great Duet at the end of the opera, sung by Imogen and Norman? < Oliver says: "I listened, with Evelyn's absent hand on my shoulder, and through the sound of the Great Duet—gnat now allied to drone—I heard his voice. A stupid, insensi tive, vain woman. They were people whose ignorance and vanity made them suitable to, acceptable to no one but each other. It was a spyhole into them, and ugly balm to my soul. 141 I listened; and I was free" (p. 128). The middle section of the novel is given to Oliver’s understanding of the Stilbournians of his class touches on himself only a little, but the first section puts him in the Context of his class; it presents his own dilemma in youth because he belongs to a class where social snobbery and lack of perception predominate. Oliver’s youth starts with his infatuation for Imogen, who never comes to know about it. He is jealous of her fiancfc Norman but is helpless. Being unlike Christopher of Pincher Martin, he will neither use Imogen nor hurt Norman, but Oliver's hatred for Norman finds satisfaction through imaginary revenge on him; he thinks that since Norman is struck by lightning, he is carry ing insensible Imogen in his arms, He cannot win Imogen in reality, but he competes with her by pursuing Evie though he realizes the "absurdity" of this "desperation" and of this "urgent" and "inevitable" pursuit (p. 30). Being aware that he "should need to stick a plaster" over the wound of his jealousy, he has Evie around three o’clock, the time of Imogen's wedding. Oliver's mother is complete ly ignorant of what goes on in his mind; she enthusiastically tells him that Imogen is going to be married to an irnpor- tant person. Infatuation, coupled with Oliver's sensitive reaction to class distinctions, enhances the complexity of his feelings 142 towards Evie. First, about Oliver's extreme awareness of class distinctions? since Oliver's father is not rich, he envies Dr. Ewans's son Robert for his punchball, box gloves, motor-bike, ability to drive a car and opportunity to go to a boarding school in Cranwall. He feels “an unwilling respect" for Robert? the image that constantly comes to bis mind, on seeing Robert, is that of the Duke of Wellington's profile, representing the white men who kept the Empire. Oliver tries to bridge the social gulf between Robert and himself? after winning a fight against him, Oliver feels a little sorry and attempts to be friendly but "Robert cut me dead. He hoisted the Duke of Wellington's profile into the air with all its plaster and carried it straight through into the house. I did not laugh. I was humiliated and ashamed" (p. 31). Oliver's other approach to the problem is to assert himself? even when they have "hardly been out of" their prams, are "socially innocent, so to speak," Robert tells Oliver that he is Robert's "slave" as his father is a dispenser under Robert's father? this Oliver fights back by pushing Robert against the wall. His anger and brutal force are more intense in youth. He shakes with rage when Robert humiliates him by reminding him that he does ¡ ¡not have a car and does not know how to drive. 143 Desire to assert gets mixed with his sexual needs and with the wish to compete with Imogen; he knows that Robert has had relations with Evie and finds satisfaction in the thought that he is Robert’s rival and a successful one, believing that Evie cares for him and not for Robert, though he is shocked to see that she shows no "social aware ness" and does not recognize the importance of maintaining a "proper distance." But "in the conflict between social propriety and sexual attraction there was never much doubt which would win" (p. 32). His secretive relationship with Evie causes unhappiness and worry. Even on kissing her, he is alarmed to think of the possible reactions of all the three classes, if they knew about it (p. 8). Wishing desperately to keep his attraction for Evie a secret, Oliver meets her on various pretexts but feels the eyes of Stilbourne watching him. When he thinks of the possibility that Evie is pregnant, the prospect of others* jeers, of not being able to go to Oxford and of almost killing his parents by relating them to Sergeant Babbacombe and thus crashing their social world "into the gutter" becomes an ache in his soul. His right forefinger symbolizes these sufferings, being "a bit sore" in the beginning but gradually becoming "very tender" and even "bruised" as his attraction for Evie increases. After his first attempt at having her, though an unsuccessful one, his entire left hand begins to ache, throb and 144 jump, and he cannot play the piano with his swollen hand. Oliver's piano symbolizes something akin to the poor man's gramophone, to which both the poor and the rich children listen enraptured. Oliver's piano can win Evie; in spite Of his selfish motivations for having her, he has a possibility of transcending the sexual relationship. Evie sings well, appreciates music, enjoys listening to Oliver's piano from a distance and wishes that somebody would teach her music. It is after breaking his piano that Oliver has her and finishes the possibilities of a truly fulfilled relation with her; after stopping to see Evie, he stays indoors and plays his "cheap violin in place of the piano" (p. 81). Two years after this lustful relationship with Evie, on hearing her inadvertently mention her incestuous relation ship with her father and on observing her courageous act of loudly lying in the bar that Oliver had raped her, Oliver is ashamed and confused and for the first time he perceives Evie as "a person rather than a thing;" he realizes that he could have avoided using her by promoting her desire to be "clean" and by establishing a non-sexual relationship through music (p. 90). Even sexually Oliver cannot give "tenderness" to her. Evie’s chain with a cross and inscription—Love beats every thing—-symbolizes the kind of relationship which could 145 break the "chains" that limited people, that divided them. Evie protests against his and other men's lust devoid of love and kindness, but Oliver's reaction is that though he himself wants "tenderness" he cannot give it to her as she is "no part of high fantasy and worship and hopeless jealousy" but is "the accessible thing" (p. 71). He sees a gulf between Imogen and his parents' fresh world, and Evie’s world? the former being "clean"and fresh and the latter filthy and decaying. Oliver's parents have instilled this social conscious ness in him though his mother regrets the social difference between the Ewans and her family and the fact that it cannot change into compatibility. Neither of them understands Oliver? both interfere in his life, firmly guiding him to chemistry studies at Oxford so that he may become rich. Oliver's father spies on him and Evie, watching them in the act at the time when she insists that Oliver must have her in the open. Telling Oliver emphatically that sex is a disease, he is partly responsible for Oliver's stopping to see her. Oliver's mother says that he was always rest less, that blood is stirred up in youth and that growing is difficult for boys, but is surprised to see him angry on not getting a motor bike, not knowing that his problem is the tension between sex and social propriety. She criticizes Evie for attracting men, holding a woman respon sible for the way a man acts towards her, and Oliver's 146 father proudly tells Evie that his son is not a "beast" though he is fully aware of Oliver's lustful relationship with Evie. Sex becomes a problem for Oliver because his society is snobbish and his trouble is completely opaque to his parents. Oliver's music teacher's sexual problem is different; Oliver's realization of his teacher 's problem surpasses his understanding of the Stilbourne Society and of himself. He is the first Golding protagonist who consciously attempts to understand another person almost for her own sake, devoting the third section of the novel almost entirely to her story. Oliver's realization of Miss Dawlish’s dilemma begins in his childhood, when his mind registers the emptiness in her room and even dreams about.it: Miss Dawlish "existing in a dark emptiness, a house empty of life except for the grinning piano." Boy Oliver notices that after coming in contact with a garage man, Henry, her lethargy, rigidity and severity are transformed into a strange volubility, mobility and softness; but that after Henry’s wife moves in with Miss Dawlish, she is unhappy, irritated, bitter, resentful and authoritative; her house feels empty when Henry and his wife move out* In youth, Oliver comes to know that she tries to attract Henry’s attention by getting her scooter stuck so that he must come to help her. " Finally she becomes insane—she walks naked in the town. 147 but this is the only time when she is very "calm and happy, with a relaxed smiling face." She is sent to a mental hospital? however, when the society "cured" her "properly" she is "unhappy again." Now she keeps pets such as canaries, budgerigars, and toms, which add "to the already stale house an entirely new dimension of fetor," because they reflect her cynical attitude towards humanity. (She thinks that these pets are better than human children). Oliver arrives at the conclusion that Miss Dawlish’s problem centers in her denied femininity. He understands another dimension of Miss Dawlish*s situation, that it is because of her father that she does not have an opportunity to be "a fulfilled woman, a wife and a mother." (Evie’s father, from the lowest social class, uses her sexually and is responsible for her promis cuity. Oliver’s middle-class parents spy on him and mould his life towards a career which would make him rich. Mr Dawlish, who belongs to the highest social class, denies his daughter a womanly life). In his childhood Oliver intuitively understands Mr Dawlish’s frustration caused by his failure as a musician. He sees that Mr Dawlish breaks a pedlar’s gramophone, when the man is successful in drawing a large crowd of children from different social levels. He also observes the prominence of Miss Dawlish‘s piano and of her father’s picture in the music room and the fact that Miss Dawlish goes to sleep while teaching violin. She tells 148 him how hard her father was on her if she did anything wrong while learning the art. He notices that Mr Dawlish is wild with anger to see that she is becoming interested in Henry and indifferent to music and that she does not listen to her father’s protests. Before dying, she burns Mr Dawlish*s metronome (symbolizing his own and her rigid life because of their so called "devotion" to music) and breaks Beethoven's bust into pieces with a hammer; music, which could be Oliver's emancipator, is Miss Dawlish's curse. Henry, whose contact with her opens up her hidden secret, does not see that music is her doom; he makes a very expen sive tombstone of white marble representing an organ, for her grave, with her father's words: "heaven is music" engraved on it, and proudly tells Oliver that she lies "within the earshot of the organ," "where she would have wished" (p.134), whereas Oliver regards the tombstone as "sheer weight." Henry's business grows because of Miss Dawlish's money, which he evidently pays back. But he does not realize that he has used her by not satisfying her emotional needs after stirring them up, that his super ficial attention does not help her. Oliver understands, but knows that in Henry's position he could not have given of himself to Mess Dawlish. While going through different stages of understanding Miss Dawlish's life, he understands his own parents' lack of insight; his mother, who always spies on Miss Dawlish's private life and even uses Oliver 149 to get information about her, does not realize anything. She considers the symptom—that Miss Dawlish wants atten tion from Henry—to be the disease; she says; "All she wants is for him to put a little attention about her" (p. 172). She is concerned about Henry’s financial exploitation of Miss Dawlish, but does not see that he uses her emotionally. Henry’s father is deluded too. Even when an expression comes on Oliver’s face indicating that he knows what his teacher’s trouble is, his father unterprets it to be his uneasiness on hearing about her sorrows. Oliver understands himself and the Stilbournians more than anybody else in the novel for several reasons. First; because, unlike anybody else in Stilbourne, he has conscience; when his mother, without shame, sends him to pry into the secrets of others’ private lives, he is aware that he has become an eaves—dropper, a devious and secret pryer into others’ affairs. Therefore, even as a child he is conscious of being "full of dishonesty and guilt" though it is "a generation later that" he discovers, "on looking back," why he felt this way. Retaining a keen awareness of moral issues in his youth, though he is"excited immediately" on seeing Robert’s wrecked motor bike, he does not "like" his "pleasure in the sight of’"it and is "a little worried too— not for Robert but for himself (;p. 43). His response on hearing from Evie that Robert might be a cripple for life, is again two fold; he feels "properly shocked, of course," 150 but also "a little of Stilbourne’s excitement and appetite at the news of someone else's misfortune*' (p. 39). His "intention" to pursue Evie puts him "in an instant of panic" [p. 29). On noticing her weakness and helplessness against the possibility that she may be pregnant, his sympathy is aroused temporarily? he suddenly realizes "what a dreadful thing it was to be a girl" (p. 64). Oliver’s desire to be open and frank also helps him in understanding. In conversation with Evelyn, he protests against hiding one’s real self» Everything's—wrong. Everything. There's no truth and there's no honesty. My God 1 Life can't—I mean just out there, you have only to look up at the sky— but Stilbourne accepts it as a roof. As a—-and the way we hide our bodies and the things we don't say, the things we dareA't mention, the people we don't meet— and that stuff they call music—it's a liel Don't they understand? It's a lie, a liel It's obscene! (p. 122). The only time, he proudly tells Evelyn, he was rising above the Stilbourne secretivehess and prejudice was when he had Evie "practically in public" (p. 123). Oliver's part in the opera is to carry a halberd on stage, but he cannot do so because nobody in the packed chorus gives him space to pass through the wings. At Evelyn's suggestion he takes it through the front part of the stage, symbolizing Oliver’s conscious initiation into openness. 151 Though an integral part of Stilbourne, Oliver is also an outsider, which helps him understand his town; he is the only one of the Stilbournians who can establish a rapport with the director Evelyn, who is also an outsider. He is the only Stilbournian who is the double of another outsider, Henry; both become rich by sacrificing whatever needs to be given for the purpose. In Oliver's story, the reader understands only a little more than what Oliver does, though it is his job to trace Oliver's development and insight from the three non-chronological sections. Unlike Free Fall, the reader takes Oliver at his word because Oliver does not make contradictory statements about himself or about his insight, though he is aware of paradoxes and ambivalence operating in his life. For instance, he realizes that he has paid the moral price of spying into Miss Dawlish's private life for understanding her so vividly. Oliver understands both his own moral nature and that of other characters, and he is not only aware of his own knowledge but also of the others' lack of it. In other words, there is a relation ship between understanding one's self and understanding other people. Some element of conscience, objectivity, openness and desire for knowledge in contrast with the morally stale, prejudiced, secretive and epistemologically stagnant Stilbournians enables Oliver to know them and to realize 152 that he reflects all the above features and class conscious ness of his environment but that he ha§ to some degree transcended them. Oliver’s insight into the unhealthy role of three parents, ironically from different social classes, in the sexual and vocational lives of their children is conscious* he knows that these parents do not perceive what they are doing to their children. The lesson he learns from all this is that he would not interfere with his daughter Sophy’s .life—he would let her be a woman He is aware also that every individual’s distinct persona lity needs different vocation suitable to his own talent and liking? music could have been Oliver’s redemption, but it is Miss Dawlish’s curse. IS Z Conclusion Shocked at what one man can do to another man, Golding sees a ray of hope for the happiness and survival of humanity in man’s insight into his own and others’ personality and epistemology. Therefore, his novels are admittedly didactic in their content and message, but they are great works of art at the same time. The horrors of the Second World War, memory of which makes him physically sick even several years after the war, led to the importance of violence and fear as central themes in his first two novels. The time, conditions, characters and exploration of the themes in the two novels are so differ ent that Golding does not repeat himself; though the two novels arrive at some similar conclusions, such as the one about destructive results of violence and fright, the distinct dramatization of the twin evils gives different dimensions to them. Violence in Lord of the Flies is innate and is also connected with fear but in The Inheritors, it is clearly caused by obsessive fear of danger to one’s own life. More over, the later novel hinges on several other evils. One man hurting another man continues to be the overall theme in the rest of the four novels but the emphasis shifts from brutality to cruelty. (In The inheritors Vivani and Tuami’s lust has an element of cruelty). If cruelty results 154 from lust and selfishness in Pincher Martin, in The Spire it is a consequence of complicated relationship between obsession, pride, faith, and repressed lust. Older people’s inability to understand younger people is intricately connected with the lustful and unjust relationships that the protagonists of The Pyramid and Free Fall establish with their women. Oliver is an average normal person from middles class? Sammy is a slum-born artist who loves the spiritual. Oliver’s lust .is more complex than Sammy’s? .the importance he gives to maintaining the norms of his class, to rising above his status and to following even the wrong desires of his parents, in fact the entire environ ment of his town, combined with his lust, determine his actions towards others. Where would Golding go from here? He might dramatize in different contexts the same evils that he has already "diagnosed?" he might choose the areas of evil, which he just touches upon now, such as love of wealth, love of power, I • jealousy, hypocrisy, hatred, and pleasure at another person’s misfortune? or he might explore entirely new areas of evil. Since his last novel to date is a comedy of a conventional sort for the first time, he might present evil comically or prefer the tragic mode for penetrating into more serious evils than this novel deals with. Though Golding says so far that good is not the subject matter of his novels because it can take care of itself, he does present the beauty of 155 selflessness in sparks, in characters such as Simon, Nathaniel, and Nick. In the future we might expect him to explore in detail the being, epistemology and fate of a predominantly good character (the opposite of Jocelin) or an embodiment of goodness (the opposite of pincher Christopher). Even on review ing the chosen good people he presents, one can see a pattern— they do not have an obsessive love of their own life? there fore, they respect others' right to be happy and to live? they do not hate even the most evil people though they intuitively but clearly visualize the horrors of wickedness. These caracters are not assertive but they are'bold. They understand evil but not precisely because it is so foreign to them. In spite of the similarities, the three characters are so different from each other in their being and epistemology that they can not be mistaken for one another. The good characters do not win, but in all of Golding's novels the evil people are invariably successful? Jack gets the leadership, Ta umi wipes out the Neanderthal men, Christopher triumphantly cheats, cuckolds and rapes, Jocelin builds the spire, Sammy and Oliver win Beatrice and Evie over and Oliver becomes rich. If the evil-doer survives and the innocent loses the battle, is Golding saying that evil will always win? No, though these characters get what they want, most of them "regret," according to their own potentialities, the sacrifices made to achieve their goals (except Jack, who is controlled at the end by adult intervention). Sammy's headmaster is rights 156 a person sacrificing everything for a selfish cause, ulti mately regrets his choice. And evil does not win "really" since not only are most evil-doers unhappy in proportion to the degree to which they hurt others but the more evil they are, the less chances there are of their spiritual survival, even if they seem to succeed in their life. Jack and the Homo Sapiens survive? we do not know what happens to Jack after he leaves the island, but the Homo Sapiens' survival is an unhappy one, their evil being their punishment. Oliver undergoes mental conflict between his lust and class- consciousness , and Sammy between seducing Beatrice and not seducing her because he realizes that seduction would be evil. Sammy acquires a redemptory change by being good but since his previous injustice to an innocent Beatrice cannot be forgiven, he must live with acute sense of guilt. Jocelin’s salvation hangs in balance and spiritual survival is denied to Christopher. Nathaniel and Peter of Pincher . Martin are right—-evil catches up with the evil-doer if he does not change himself for the better. Viewing the six novels in perspective, one notices that some of the characters’ sensible conclusions about the consequences of evil are true in terms of the novels in which these characters appear, the ones in which they do not appear and in terms of people as we know them outside Golding’s books. Many of Golding’s characters realize that evil brings a fast and unhappy change in the evil persons 157 arid in other people's lives. Lok is intuitively aware like a child that the homo Sapiens' wickedness has brought about misery and destruction in his family's life? Homo Sapiens Tuami perceives that Marian's lust for Vivani and his own "compulsion" to follow Marian has changed him adversely. Ralph and Piggy of Lord of the Flies see that Jack’s love of power and of hunting is responsible for chaos on the island. Christopher in Pincher Martin and his friends know that because of his self-centredness, Christopher crushes everybody's happiness under his feet and after his death Christopher finds out that he cannot survive spiritually since he has exploited others. Evil mingled with good brings ambivalent results? Jocelin knows that his spire, representing his faith, pride and lust has sacrificed some people but has at the same time led to opening of new roads for trade. Less "guilty" Sammy is acutely conscious that his seduction and desertion of innocent Beatrice have meant insanity for her and feelings of "responsibility" and guilt for himself, but that because of his love of the spiritual and regard for the good, he has unknowingly delayed Beatrice's inherited tendencies towards insanity. Oliver, the least evil of Golding's adult protagonists brings least trouble? he is aware that he does not ruin anybody's life but that he fails to promote good even when he can. If the consequences of evil are so dangerous—misery, 158 mental-torture, chaos, insanity, death, spiritual death- then it must be counteracted, it must be controlled. Imme diate and practical efforts to control evil from outside are made only in the first Golding novel? Piggy's insistence on keeping first things first instead of following emotions blindly, and Ralph's attempt to enforce rules avert chaos but only temporarily. Ralph realizes the importance of understanding his own and others' violence and its results in a time of emergency in order to restrain himself and other boys. • This is exactly what civilized governments are able to do with partial success. But lasting way of controlling evil Is to go beyond understanding and controlling it under pressure. The Pyramid and Free Fall imply this idea clearly. In these novels the adults do not understand and restrain their own evil or that of younger people, passing it on from generation to generation? the parents and society are shown as playing a role in enhancing it instead of reducing it. What can be achieved by understanding then? Who can use his understanding in a constructive way? Christopher is least capable of putting into use whatever he learns because his egoism makes it impossible for him to gain insight into the most important area of understanding applicable to his particular situation—-that he can and must leave his egoism. Jocelin, in spite of his evasiveness and blind “devotion" for his cause, is humane enough to realize somewhat that while 159 building the spire and sacrificing others he went against the law of humaneness? yet by the time he understands,;it is too late for him to change since he has completed his job and is nearing death. Middle-aged Sammy, who values goodness and knowledge, who knows lust and its results so perfectly, who perceives the undesirable consequences of the negative or indifferent roles of his friends in his life—can be expected to act wisely with younger people. The gist of Oliver’s conscious understanding is that he will not interfere with his daughter's justifiable and natural desires as he has carefully watched three parents mould their children's lives into evil. Consequently, in the six novels, the counterpoint to ethical understanding and its validity is the exploration of epistemology itself, the nature and extent of the characters' understanding varying with the difference in their ethical and intellectual being. Childlike innocent and intuitive Lok, a primitive Neanderthal man, cannot understand precisely but learns largely at a sub-conscious level. Innocent Simon, with a pre-adolescent mind, under stands fully but only intuitively though consciously. Good adult Nathaniel knows intuitively and clearly even the consequences of evil after one's death. Nick is aware that sex is a disease but cannot picture what it feels like to have the "disease" and how it can become a normal desire. Unlike the previous three good characters, Scientist i 160' Nick gives exclusive importance to rationality and not to intuition. Pre-adolescent Ralph, beginning to enter the arena of rationality and evil, understands with his reason alone and realizes the importance of reason but not that of intui tion. "Guilty" Sammy and Oliver, with their average intel ligence, intuition and reason, can understand wickedness quite clearly and they even understand the roles of intui tion and reason in understanding. / Being more anxious to understand than any of the Golding protagonists, Samijiy also knows that developed mind, domi nated by ethical weakness, results in self-deception. Indeed, egoist and intelligent Christopher can perceive that this is exactly true about him, that his intelligence, governed by his selfishness, distorts the reality about his situation. Less wicked and less intelligent Jocelin evades reality more than distorting it and is aware that he is doing precisely this. The didactic and epistemological themes of Golding's novels combined with the inherent ethical and epistemological symbols take his books far away from preaching. Golding seems to say; this is what I see, this is what my characters find in themselves* this exploration may illuminate my own being for myself and yours for you. Presenting his prota gonists’ insight as well as lack of knowledge mainly through their own point of view, Golding expects the reader to I 161 actively unravel what the point of view protagonist does not know, what he cannot interpret, or what he obscures for the reader because he consciously or unconsciously deludes himself. For instance, the reader must use reasoned deduction to understand various facets of the Homo Sapiens* evil, consequences of evil and possibilities of salvation, which childlike Lok of The Inheritors knows through senses, symbols, intuition, and association, and the Homo Sapiens Tuami understands only to a limited extent though somewhat rationally. The reader’s epistemological "adventure" is different but enjoyable in each novel? for example, in order to gain insight into intelligent, educated and "civilized" Christopher’s situation in Pincher Martin, so different from that of Lok, the reader must distinguish between Christopher’s delusion, illusion, and hallucination and his understanding. Golding accepts the reality of change, even of the one that comes because of our evil, but it is at the root of epistemological and ethical stagnance—which closes the doors to a happy and constructive change—that he strikes. Three of Golding’s characters—Sammy, Oliver and Simon— in their own ways, realize the need for facing the truth inside or outside, howsoever frightening it may be. Golding’s greatest achievement, I believe, is to present every character's epistemological process as distinctly individual and yet to reveal some universal truths which would apply in some way to his other characters in the same or the 162 other novels and to human beings in general. Consequently, the reader has the pleasure of disentangling obscurity and symbols that are inherent in the nature of these thought- provoking novels and of penetrating a broader dimension of reality about the questions of one's happiness and survival. Showing man in the perspective of his distant ancestors, his novels are anthropological? revealing the depths of human mind, they are psychological. Emphasis on the significance of choice brings them close to both the Christian and the existentialist ideas on the subject. They are Darwinian in hinting at the role of inheritance, in diagnosing the role of environment and in showing the survival of the fittest. The exploration of innocence, sin, guilt, confession, responsibility, salvation, redemption, and spiritual survival makes them religious. Though Golding touches upon all these approaches to understanding man, the exploration of ethical epistemology is the goal and the "religion" of his universe. A Selected Bibliography Axthelm, Peter M. "The Search for Reconstructed Order: Koestier and Golding," The Modern Confessional Novel. New Haven, 1967, 97-127. Babb, H. S. "Four Passages from William Golding’s Fiction," Minnesota Review. V (Jan. April 1965), 50-58. Baker, James R. William Golding. New York, 1965. Bowen, John. "One Man's Meat: The Idea of Individual Responsibility," Times Literary Supplement. LVIII (August 1959), xii-xiii. Boyle, Ted E. "The Denial of the Spirit: An Explication of William Golding’s Free Fall," Wascana Review. I (1966), 3-10. Broes, Arthur T. "The Two Worlds of William Golding," Lectures on Modern Novelists. Pittsburg, 1963, 1-14. Bufkin, Ernest Claude. "The Novels of William Golding," unpublished dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1964. Burgess, Anthony. The Novel To-day. British Council, 1963, 22-23. ■_____ . The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contempo rary Fiction. London, 1967. Cohn, Alan. "The Berengaria Allusion in Lord of the Flies." Notes and Queries, XIII (Nov. 1966), 419-420. Cook, Albert. Prisms; Studies in Modern Literature. Bloomington, 1967, 120-127. Cox, C. B. The Free Spirit. London, 1963, 195. Crompton, D. W. "The Spire," Critical Quarterly, IX (Spring 1967), 63-79. Davis, Douglas M. "A Conversation with Golding," The New Republic, CXLVIII (May 1963), 28-30. ______... . "Golding, the Optimist, Belies His Somber Pictures and Fiction," National Observer. I (Sept. 1962), 17. 164 Dick, Bernard. "The Novelist is a Displaced Person: An Interview with William Golding," College English. XXVI (March 1965), 480-482. ______• William Golding. New York, 1967. Dolbier, Maurice. "Running J. D. Salinger a Close Second," New York Herald Tribune Books. XXXVIII (May 1962), 6, 15. Ely, M. A. "Adult Image in Three Novels of Adolescent Life," English Journal. LVI (Nov. 1967), 1127-31. Freedman, Ralph. "The New Realism: The Fancy of William Golding," Perspective. X (Summer Autumn 1958), 118-128. Gindin, James. "’Gimmick’ and Metaphor in the Novels of William Golding," Modern Fiction Studies. VI (Summer I960), 145-152. Golding, William. "Advice to a Nervous Visitor," Holiday, XXXIV (July 1963), 42-43, 93-97, 125-126. ______. “An Affection for Cathedrals," Holiday. XXXVIII (Dec. 1965), 35-39, 41-42. ______. "The Anglo-Saxon," The Queen. CCXV (Dec. 1959), 27-30. ______. The Brass Butterfly. London, 1958. ■ . "Delphi: The Oracle Revealed," Holiday. XLII (August 1967), 60, 87—88, 90. ______. Free Fall. London, 1964. ______The Hot Gates. New York, 1965. ______.. "Inside a Pyramid," Esguire. LXVI (Dec. 1966), 165, 302. ______. The Inheritors. New York. 1955. ______. "It’s a Long Way to Oxyrhynchus," Spectator. CCVII (July. 1961), 9. ______. Lord of the Flies. New York, 1968. ______■. "Miss Pulkinhorn," Encounter. XV (August 1960), 27-32. ______. "Party of One: The Best of Luck." Holiday. XXXV (May 1964), 12, 14-17. 165 ______. "Party of One: Thinking as a Hobby," Holiday. XXX (August 1961), 8, 10-13. ______. Pincher Martin. London, 1964. ______. "Pincher Martin," Radio Times. CXXXVIII (March 1958), 8. ______The Pyramid. New York, 1967. '______. "Envoy Extraordinary." Sometime, Never. New York,' 1962. ______. The Spire. New York, 1964. .______. "Through the Dutch Waterway," Holiday, XXXI (Jan. 1962), 58-59, 91-92, 94-96, 100. ______■ . "The Writer in His Age," London Magazine, IV (May 1957), 45-46. Gordon, Robert C. "Classical Themes in Lord of the Flies." Modern Fiction Studies. XI (Winter 1965), 424-27. Green, Peter. "Pincher Martin." Times Literary Supplement. LVIII (August 1959), 495. .______. "The World of William Golding. " Review of English Literature. I (April 1960), 62-72. Hampton, T. "An Error in Lcrd of the Flies." Notes and Queries. XII (July 1965), 275. Harris, W. V. "Golding's Free Fall." Explicator. XXIII, (May 1965), item 76, Killegas, Mark R. The Future As Nightmare. New York, 1967. Hurt, James R. "Grendel's Point of View: Beowulf and William Golding," Modern Fiction Studies. XIII, (Summer 1967), 264-265. Hynes, Samuel. William Golding. New York, 1964. Kermode, Frank. "The Meaning of It All," Books and Bookmen. V (October 1959), 9-10. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor, William Golding: A Critical Study. New York, 1967. Lederer, R. H. "Student Reactions to Lord of the Flies." English Journal. LIII(Nov. 1964), 575-579. 166 "Lord of the Campus," Time. LXXIX (June 1962), 64. MacLure, Miller. "Allegories of Innocence," Dalhousie Review, XL (Summer 1960), 145-156. MacNeice, Louis. Varieties of Parable. Cambridge, 1965. MacShane, Frank. "The Novels of William Golding," Dalhousie Review. XLII (Summer 1962), 171-183. Nelson, William. Lord of the Flies? a Source Book. New York, 1963. O’Hara, J. D. "Mute Choirboys and Angelic Pigs: The Fable in Lord of the Flies." Texas Studies in Literature and Language. VII (Winter 1966), 411-420. Oldsey, B. S. and Stanley Weintraub. The Art of William Golding. New York, 1965. Pritchett, V. S. "Pain and William Golding," The Working Novelist. London, 1965, 56-61. Quinn, Michael. "An Unheroic Hero: William Golding’s Pincher Martin." Critical Quarterly. IV (Autumn 1962), 247-256. Roper, Derek. "Allegory and Novel in Golding’s The Spire." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, V111 (Winter 1967), 19-30. c Rosenberg, Bruce A. "Lord of the Fire-Flies," Centennial Review. XI (Winter 1967), 128-139. Rosenfield, Claire. "’Men of a Smaller Growth! A Psychological Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies," Literature and Psychology. XI (Autumn 1961), 93-101. Seymour-Smith, Martin. "Golding’s Pyramid," Spectator. CCXIII (June 1967), 768-769. Sternlicht, S. "The Sin of Pride in Golding’s The Spire." Minnesota Review, V (Jan. April 1965), 59-60. Stevenson, Lionel. "Moods of Scorn and Protest," The History of the English Novel: Yesterday and After. Vol. 11, New York, 1967, 375-380. Sullivan, Walter. "The Long Chronicle of Guilt: William Golding’s The Spire," I (June 1964), 1-12. 167 Taylor, Harry H. “The Case Against William Golding's Simon-Piggy," Contemporary Review. CCIX (Sept. 1966), 155-160. Veidemanis, G. “Lord of the Plies in the Classroom: No Fassing Fad.“ English Journal. LIII (Nov. 1964), 569-574. Vogel, A. W. “William Golding on the nature of man,** Educational Theory, XV (April 1965), 130-134. Wasserstrom, William. "Reason and Reverence in Art and Science," Literature and Psychology. XII (Winter 1962), 2-5. Webster, Owen. "Pincher Martin," Times Literary Supplement. LVIII (Sept. 1959), 519. . "Living with Chaos," Books and Art. I (March 1958), 15-16. Whitbread, Thomas B. "An Illiberal Education: William Golding's Pedagogy," Seven Contemporary Authors. Austin, 1966, 73-95. White, Robert J. "Butterfly and Beast in Lord of the Flies," Modern Fiction Studies. X (Summer 1964), 163-170. Whitehead, John. "A Conducted Tour to the Pyramid," London Magazine, VII (June 1967), 100-104. Young, Wayland. "Letter from London," Kenyon Review. XIX (Summer 1957), 47S-482.