William Golding's Pincher Martin: A Study of Self and its Terror of Negation

Abstract

<p>Pincher Martin describes the genesis of a preternatural world and then this world's gradual disintegration as its lonely creator, the novel's protagonist, embarks on an unwilling voyage of discovery to the dark wellsprings of self. While occasionally touching on matters pertaining to the novel's structure, each chapter of this thesis concentrates on tracing the development of this theme. Chapter I details the miracle of creation that proceeds from self's inscrutable essence, the role of association in this process, and the nexus between creation and self's survival after the body's death. Chapter II begins to articulate the novel's central irony: from within the same dark core of self responsible for the salvation of the first ordered creation, a second order, formed out of memory and destructive of its precursor, gradually begins to emerge. Chapter II also shows how reason 'assists in the rebirth of psycho-physical self, and,.; ,how by seeking to lend solidity and order to the created artifice, methodical reason pits itself against spontaneous revelation. Chapter III considers the collapse of self's artifice beneath the weight of accumulating realization. It also discusses how reason becomes inadequate and finally goes awry as self divides into components operating at cross-purposes. The Hindu sources of Golding's notions of subjective and objective reality -- together with his protagonist's final agonies in the teeth of not-being -- are the subjects of Chapter IV. In the final section of the thesis, the relationship of chapter fourteen to the novel's structure and theme is examined, and Pincher Martin is discussed within the context of Golding's first four novels.</p>