陶渊明和梭罗

1 William Golding s Art of Writing in Lord of the Flies Author FANG Yang Abstract The winner of Noble Literature Prize William Golding s masterpiece Lord of the Flies is concerned with the problem of evil with its outstanding art of writing Therefore he was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize for his novels which with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth illuminate the human condition in the world today The present thesis will make an attempting probe of his unique art of writing and how these arts contribute to the theme in Lord of the Flies It focuses on its symbolism and ending Golding constructed many striking and complicated symbols to suggest difficult human conditions His symbols make the plot and meaning of the novel clear and easy to understand The ending is of great importance to this novel It turns suddenly and actually offers the reader a complete comprehension of the whole story The arts employed in the novel help to not only smoothen the way for the plot but also uncover the deeper meaning of this novel Therefore this thesis is to analyze the arts in the novel and the connotation they bring the reader Key words symbolism ending human nature 威廉 戈尔丁在 蝇王 中的写作艺术 摘要摘要 诺贝尔文学奖获得者 威廉 戈尔丁的成名作 蝇王 以其卓越的写作艺术反映了 人性恶的主题 因此他的小说 以清晰的现实主义叙述手法和为人所熟知却形态各异的神 话 阐明了当今人类世界的情况 而获奖 本篇论文是对 蝇王 的独特写作艺术及其对 主题的贡献的探究 主要从象征和小说的结局入手 戈尔丁以错综复杂 引人入胜的象征 使得小说的情节清晰易懂 小说的结尾也显示了其重要性 它令人耳目一新的同时也让读 者对小说有了进一步全面的了解 小说中使用的艺术手法一方面为情节的发展做了铺垫 另一方面也更好地揭示了其深层含义 因此本篇论文的目的是研究小说中的写作艺术并为 读者揭示作品的内涵 关键词关键词 象征手法 结局 人性 1 Introduction 1 1 About William Golding William Golding was born in the village of St Columb Minor in Cornwall in 1911 His father was a schoolmaster who had radical convictions in politics and a strong faith in science and his mother was active in the suffragette movement As a child Golding enjoyed himself in reading books His reading in his childhood exerted a deep and lasting influence on his later writing Golding started writing at the age of seven but following the wishes of his parents he studied natural sciences and English at Brasenose College Oxford His first book a collection of poems which he has said that he would rather forget it appeared a year before Golding received his B A After graduation Golding became a settlement house worker and wrote plays in London In 1939 he married and moved to Salisbury where he began teaching English at Bishop Wordsworth s School His experience as a teacher is another important factor influencing his writing Being a teacher he had so much time and chance to be with the children especially with the boys He knew exactly what were like This was reflected in Lord of the Flies But his teaching career soon interrupted by the outbreak of war During World War II he served in the Royal Navy in command 2 of a rocket ship His active service included involvement in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and participating in the Normandy invasion After the war Golding returned to writing and teaching with a dark view of humanity s progress They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been expected they were very brown and filthily dirty Golding 64 In Salisbury Golding wrote four books but did not get them published His novel Lord of the Flies was turned down by twenty one publishes until it finally appeared in 1954 The book became an immediate success in Britain and a bestseller among American readers in the late 1950s The success of the novel allowed Golding to give up teaching Lord of the Flies was followed by The Inheritors which depicted the extermination of Neanderthal man Sapiens In The Inheritors there is no understanding or love between these two races Pincher Martin was a story of a naval officer Christopher Hadley Martin who faces death after his ship is torpedoed The protagonist imagines his survival and struggles against the sea and cold Christopher believes he is on a rock island in Mid Atlantic The rock he clings has many similarities with his diseased tooth The Free Fall was set in contemporary society The narrator is an artist Sammy Mountjoy who looks back over his past to find the crossroads of his life and the moment he lost his freedom Golding resigned in 1961 from teaching and devoted himself entirely to writing The Spire was a story about the construction of a cathedral spire Jocelyn dean of a cathedral has decided to erect a spire before his death But its construction causes sacrifice of others treachery and murder Golding also used in his works ideas familiar from science fiction such as the origin of man nuclear holocaust and highly advanced inventions In the play The Brass Butterfly based on Golding s short story Envoy Extraordinary a Greek inventor Phanocles tries to get his steam engine gun pressure cooker and printing press accepted by the Roman emperor Among Golding s later works is the historical trilogy Rites of Passage which portrayed life abroad an ancient ship of the line at the end of the Napoleonic Wars It was awarded the Booker Prize Other parts of the trilogy were Close Quarters and Fire Down Below Golding s novel The Paper Men was about the battle between the world famous English novelist Wilfred Barclay and the American academic Rick L Turner who has decided to write Barclays biography even if he has to kill him Golding was knighted in 1988 He died in Perranarworthal on June 19 1993 Golding s last novel The Double Tongue left in draft at his death was published in 1995 The story was set in the ancient Greece and depicted a Delphic oracle who witnessed the rise of the Roman power and retreat of the Hellenistic culture 1 2 About Lord of the Flies Golding s most widely read work Lord of the Flies has sold millions of copies worldwide It has been translated into all major languages and many minority ones It has been adapted for radio and filmed in 1963 and 1990 It is an ironic comment on R M Ballantyne s The Coral Island using also the names of its characters It is no accident that The Coral Island should be explicitly referred to near the beginning and at the end of Lord of the Flies since William Golding by intention sets himself to write an island story that deliberately challenges Ballantyne s This is obvious from what he says in an unpublished letter I said to Ann Golding s wife in about 1953 wouldn t it be a good idea to write a book about real boys on an island showing what a mess they d make She said That is a good idea So I sat down and wrote it Wilson 3 The story describes a group of children who are evacuated from Britain because of a nuclear war Their airplane crashes on an uninhabited island and all the adults are killed The boys create 3 their own society which gradually degenerates from a democratic rational and moral community to a tyrannical and cruel one The older boys take control a boy called Piggy who is asthmatic and nearsighted becomes a target of teasing and hunt torment Leaders emerge two of the older boys get killed and they begin to another just as a ship arrives Lord of the Flies defers from the ever popular tale of island adventure It denies the world in which men are unfailingly reasonable cooperative loving and lovable such as that in the Coral Island Unlike other English desert island fiction Lord of the Flies doesn t manifest the people s selflessness courage and faith in the Creator but the selfishness greed and superstitious fear It even denies the innocence of the children which is deep rooted in people s mind The theme of Lord of the Flies is described by Golding as follows in a publicity questionnaire The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears dignified and capable but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island The officer having interrupted a man hunt prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser Qtd in Baker 277 Golding s view is pessimistic human nature is inherently corruptible and wicked Thus the 19th century ideals of progress and education are based on false premises Although the boys have been taught social skills their desire to kill is unleashed when there are no strict rules of the English public school system to control their behavior This is the world of freedom which is ruled by savages and the ultimate evil the Lord of the Flies Lord of the Flies not only represents Golding s viewpoint on human nature but also embodies his masterly art of writing Therefore it is of great importance to study them to understand his purposes of writing this novel This thesis is mainly about the following aspects ingenuous symbolism striking foreshadowing and trick ending As mentioned before Golding says the whole book is symbolic So it is necessary to study it further And foreshadowing is another important skill which is used extensively in this novel Golding prefers a sudden turn in his novels and this novel is not an exception Instead it emphasizes it 2 Ingenuous Symbolism Webster Dictionary defines symbolism as the systematic use of symbols to represent or allude to something In the most literal sense all language is with symbolic In a narrower sense symbolism is the use of iconic figures particular conventional meanings Symbolism is one of the most noticeable aspects of this book Golding uses device to convey his insight about human nature to the reader Just as Bernard S Oldsey remarks Golding is essentially a literary man who uses scene character and symbol to achieve imaginative literary effects qtd in Wei 20 2 1 Heroes on the Island That Lord of the Flies is a successful adventure story depends on its recognizable and authentic characters First and foremost Golding has to win our acceptance of his boys as boys Having achieved this he is then able to introduce individual characters with traits and 4 qualities and afford us insights into different human types or at the deepest level of all into the human condition itself Indeed it is Golding s distinction to have created characters who are wholly credible at a realistic level while they remain powerfully persuasive as types When the reader is first introduced to the characters they are not only boys but boys who are more themselves than ever because they are liberated from adult control The individual characters here have their respective symbolic values which signify important ideas or themes 2 1 1 Ralph Ralph the responsible one the born perfect symbolizes order leadership and civilization To some extent he like an angel blows a horn that announces good news that of survival Ralph has some of the obvious characteristics of a schoolboy hero and leader twelve years old well built fair haired and middle class He is easy to recognize as the other boys well balanced decent and very normal unlike Piggy Jack and Simon His dependability and normality stem from his secure home background which means a great deal to him He dreams and daydreams of it more and more as things break up in the island adventure Golding 154 And Ralph is almost always fair minded He takes his leadership seriously with some occasional encouragement from Piggy and offers help for everyone and especially the littluns who most need it When the other boys escape their duties to play or swim or hunt Ralph tries to build shelters with steady determination When he is voted chief he is sensitive to Jack s disappointment and tries to avoid conflict by delivering the choir to Jack as hunters In this way he shows a restraint and fair mindedness Jack himself would have been utterly incapable of Even at the end of the story he is tempted to believe that the other boys must share his own basic decency and sense of justice 2 1 2 Jack Compared with Ralph Jack with red hair and a black cloak is a symbol of savagery and the naked ruthless desire for power From the start Jack asserts his claims to the leadership and is unflinching in struggling to achieve it Jack is also an intellectual when it suits his purpose He is first to realize that Piggy s spectacles can be put into use as burning glasses and when he takes the conch he speaks with cleverness and cunning and also debates with Ralph In Chapter 8 he actually calls an assembly to challenge Ralph s leadership and argue that Ralph is a talker like Piggy who fails to value the hunters and is though this is a lie a coward He fails and goes off on his own weeping humiliating tears Golding 140 But in some sense he is successful since most of the boys desert Ralph to join his tribe which makes him brilliantly happy Golding 146 After this however Jack submerges himself in his role of chief He becomes remote like an idol and his word is law Rules and harsh punishment for those who break them are an absolute necessity for an intensely Fascist mentality like Jack s 2 1 3 Piggy Piggy who is fat asthmatic shortsighted represents the scientific and intellectual aspects of civilization We know Piggy only by his nickname and Golding like most of the boys enjoys a joke at his expense since he often uses a vocabulary associated with pigs in referring to him Several things make him an outsider his asthma his fatness and laziness 5 comparative intellectual maturity his poor eyesight his being working class in speech and background From the beginning Piggy himself recognizes that he is an outsider He does all he can to ingratiate himself with Ralph though Ralph s initial reactions are to abuse him in a casual way because of his ass mar and aunt and to betray his nickname which is given by Piggy in confidence Piggy s shortcomings are immediately obvious and invite ridicule his merits require time and experience to be appreciated At last we should note that the progressive harms inflicted on Piggy his becoming half blind then almost entirely blind correspond to the stages of the boys retreat from civilized standards into an irrational savagery 2 2 Objects on the Island 2 2 1 The Conch Shell While Ralph and Piggy wandering around the island they discover a large conch shell on the beach Piggy explains to Ralph that they can use it as a trumpet to summon the boys together In this way the conch shell becomes a symbol of civilization and order in the novel in so far as it is the instrument used to call meetings and the instrument which preserves order during the meetings only the boy in possession of the shell may speak In this regard the shell is more than a symbol it is an actual vessel of political legitimacy and democratic power Eventually this natural jewel creamy pink in color and delicately embossed with lovely patterns becomes a sacred talisman to the boys But by the time the island civilization erodes and the boys descend into savagery the conch shell loses its power and influence among them At last along with Piggy s skull it is crushed to pieces The fate of the shell is the fate of civilized life on the island 2 2 2 Piggy s Glasses As Piggy is the most intelligent rational boy in the group his glasses represent the power of science and intellectual endeavor in society We can see it clearly at the beginning of the novel when are used as magnifying lenses to ignite the dry wood to start a fire When breaks one of the lenses the power of savagery has been out of control While Jack s hunters attack Ralph s camp and steal the glasses the savages have had the power to make fire leaving Ralph s group helpless 2 2 3 The Signal Fire In the beginning Ralph discusses the need for building and maintaining a signal fire on the mountain in case a ship passes to rescue the boys The boys are all enthusiastic about this idea As a result the signal fire becomes a reaction of the boys connection to civilization In the early parts of the novel the boys maintain the fire which shows that they want to be rescued and return to society When the fire goes out we realize that the boys desire of being rescued has gone down too 2 2 4 The Beast At first one of the youngest children shyly tells about a Beast a snake thing which he sees it at night Then this imaginary Beast begins to frighten all the boys Although the older boys assure the littlun that it is only nightmare the seeds of doubt and fear are planted among them Actually the Beast here is not from the water or air It stands for the primal instinct of savagery that exists within all human beings so they can never escape it The more savage the boys grow the stronger their belief in the Beast grows By the end of the novel the boys are leaving it the sacrifice the pig s head and treating it as a totemic god It is the boys fear 6 that brings the Beast into existence so the more savagely the boys act the more real the Beast seems to become 2 2 5 The Lord of the Flies The Lord of the Flies the novel s central symbol is the bloody sow s head covered with ravenous flies chosen by Jack and his hunters as an offering to the Beast This symbol becomes the most important image in the novel when Simon confronts the sow s head in the glade As the Lord of the Flies says the evil originates in everyone and it is common to all mankind You knew didn t you I m part of you Close close close I m the reason why it s no go Why things as they are Golding 158 Later it promises to have some fun Golding 159 with him This fun foreshadows Simon s death in the following chapter In this way the Lord of the Flies becomes both a physical manifestation of the Beast a symbol of the power of evil and a kind of Satan figure who evokes the Beast within each human being In fact the name Lord of the Flies is a literal translation of the Hebrew word Ba atzevuv Beelzebub in Greek which might have two kinds of meanin