| William Golding (1911-1993), a renowned British novelist, has been persisting in literary writing since the publication of his masterpiece Lord of the Flies in1954. During his lifetime, he has altogether created twelve novels, a play, three essay collections and a collection of short stories. Known as an "allegory composer", through the form of allegory metaphor in his works, Golding reveals human living status with profound ambiguity and complexity, exposes the dark side of human nature and conveys a deep pessimistic consciousness for the destiny of human beings. In1983, Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for the reason that his novels "have portrayed a widespread myth of absurd consciousness and illuminated human living state in modern times with a distinct and diverse narrative style of the contemporary realism."A noticeable time division could be perceived throughout the writing career of Golding. After the creation of Lord of the Flies in1954, he proceeded to accomplish four novels in succession, including The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964) within the following ten years, which is referred to as the "golden decade" of Golding’s writing career. During this period, his works attracted wide attention and high praise from both readers and critics, accordingly, the novelist himself won various honors. Subsequently, in his novel The Pyramid published in1967, Golding no longer adopted his habitual technique of allegorical metaphor to manifest the theme of evil humanity. As a result, he was severely criticized by his readers and the critics. Afterwards, over the next decade, Golding seemed to disappear from the literary world without any works being published. Many people even began to suspect that with declining writing creativity he could not create such works that caused a sensation across the literary world as Lord of the Flies any more. However, after ten years’ absence from the literary world, in1979, Golding returned with his newly-completed novel Darkness Visible, whose publication aroused an enormous sensation and earned a roaring reputation. Hence, Golding stepped into the vigorous creative period of his twilight years, which was actually the second prime phase of his writing career. Later on, Golding accomplished his comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, comprising Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), in which Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize.The critics have paid close attention to the time division in the writing career of Golding and offered a variety of interpretations upon discrepancies between his earlier novels and later ones. A comparative study of his works during this two remarkable phases will show that, rooted in the traditional Western concept of evil humanity, his earlier novels capture people’s widespread speculation and concern about human nature after World War II and regard evil as the transcendental and trans-historical essence of human nature. His earlier novels convey such sentiments as confusion and pessimism about Western civilization and human prospect with a moral reflection and exploration of abstract human nature that is filled with metaphorical expression about concepts. In contrast, his later novels treat the formation of human nature and personality as a complex process and survey it in a broad social environment. Consequently, in his later novels the religious symbols become more prominent while the allegorical metaphor structure widely used in his earlier works disappears. In general, in Golding’s literary creation, there are a succession of shifts between his earlier novels and later ones, for instance, from mythological writing to historical writing, from abstract myth allegory to concrete realistic novel, and from an exploration of ethics to an exposure of secular hierarchy concepts. Moreover, Golding adopts a comedy mode in his later writings, with a more distinct postmodern inclination.The studies of Golding in China mostly focus on his single work, especially his masterpiece Lord of the Flies, far from a comprehensive and systematic research of his writing. As a breakthrough attempt of this unbalanced, incomprehensive, and unsystematic studies on Golding, this dissertation, taking his six earlier novels such as Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire, and The Pyramid as research object, presents a systematic study of Golding’s pessimistic consciousness revealed from his exploration of human nature and society by the adoption of such approaches as social historiography, close reading, archetypal criticism and comparative literature. The dissertation will analyze the embodiment of Golding’s pessimistic consciousness in the theme of his earlier novels and the usage of artistic techniques for showing the pessimistic consciousness, and then survey the origin of his pessimistic consciousness from the perspective of influence study so as to illustrate the point that Golding’s pessimistic consciousness, as an awareness of his life experience, stems from a profound observation of man’s essential existence and reflects the degeneration of humans and fragile condition and dilemma of civilization, rationality, morality at an epoch of culture crack in the20th century.This dissertation also analyses the topic of redemption that is the underlying hope in Golding’s novels for the degenerating humans. This underlying hope shows that Golding’s pessimistic consciousness is not negative. Through exposing the evil humanity, Golding wants to urge human beings to realize and reflect their own nature, to return from evil to good and to search for the road of redemption in the dark world.The dissertation consists of six sections. As a leading-in part, Section One presents a brief introduction of the writing career of Golding and an updated literary review about him both at home and abroad. In general, with an early starting, foreign scholars have already made fruitful achievements upon the studies of Golding. They analyze his works from multiple perspectives including social history, mythological prototype, feminism and narrative structures, by the application of such theories as philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology and linguistics. In contrast, domestic research about Golding was quite backward, as his works started to attract a widespread attention of Chinese scholars only after Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature in1983. What is worse, the majority of study thesis mainly concentrate on his masterpiece Lord of the Flies and provide only an introduction, an interpretation of the text or a probe into his writing techniques with comparatively singular perspective.Section Two analyzes the theme of evil humanity evolved out of the pessimistic consciousness. Being an optimistic young man, Golding went through a dramatic change in thinking after his experience of the Second World War. Despite different settings and various characters, evil humanity has been a prevailing theme in his novels, which accordingly turns out to be a peculiar perspective for Golding to ponder over human nature and surviving crisis of human beings.There prevailed a kind of pessimistic consciousness in Golding’s conception of human existence and fate. First of all, he holds that human degeneration happens everywhere, not only upon each individual, but also among social groups, and even in the whole course of human evolution. In order to prove the prevalent existence of evil humanity, Golding sets the background of time of his novels in past, present and future and sets the background of space from deserted island, solitary reef and cell to a typical British town, a true miniature of social reality. Secondly, he believes that human degeneration is inevitable. Evil humanity arises with the birth of consciousness, the latter being the unavoidable result of human evolution as well as a symbol of human civilization. However, with the birth of consciousness, there arises the distinction between the self and the other, and naturally people would become more concerned about their own benefits and turn out to be selfish and ego-oriented. Sin develops along with the continuous development of human knowledge and rationality in the process of human gradual control over nature. Thus, Golding’s novels reveal "a particularly profound paradox of human civilization:along with the advancement of the instrumental rationality, man is getting more evil at the innermost part of his heart".Section Three presents an analysis of allegorical style, namely, the artistic expression from Golding’s perspective of pessimistic consciousness. Golding, just like his contemporary writers "Angry Young Men", embraces a pessimistic outlook upon the current situation of the Western society. However, his perception, with a further effort of thinking and creation, appears to be more mature. Compared with the so-called "Angry Young Men", who choose to expose the social evils directly with an absolutely realistic technique and to express personal despair and discontent through a sharp denouncement of the existing institutions of authority, Golding, taking allegory as his major narrative technique, develops a new way of his own to explore the root of social evil from human nature and to reveal his pessimistic perception upon human nature. The style of Golding’s allegory novels is mainly manifested with the combination of parody, symbol and irony, which takes shape after his conscious application of diverse modern techniques.Golding is fond of the adoption of parody. He reconstructs totally new text out of the source text, whose theme would be burlesqued and subverted through the overall transformation, so that his doubt to the tradition would finally be achieved. Lord of the Flies is the parody of The Coral Island (1858) created by Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894). It highlights the subversion of the theme of traditional Utopia by that of dystopia. The Inheritors is the parody of The Outline of History (1920) written by Herbert George Wells (1866-1946). It reveals the dialectical relationship between "evolution" and "retrogression". Pincher Martin is the parody of Robinson Crusoe and Greek myth of Prometheus. It creates an antagonist with a integrated image of hero and villain.Moreover, Golding is also adept at symbolism in his writing conception. He would consciously endow the theme, plot, character, structure, and even language with symbolic meaning and juxtapose various symbolic forms so as to integrate them into an organic symbolic system. This section will analyze such theme archetype as degeneration, redemption and growth, character archetype including Apollo, Dionysus, devil, sage, Christ and martyrs, setting archetype containing deserted island, the Garden of Eden, and cellar, as well as imagery archetype covering the lord of flies, fire, conch, spire and so on. Through the above analysis, it is apparent that with the construction of the symbolic system, Golding, in a metaphorical manner, presents the actual condition of human beings and reveals his concern for human plight as well as his speculation about human nature.Irony is another commonly used device of revealing evil humanity in Golding’s novels. In his writing, Golding attaches more attention to the combination of verbal irony, situational irony and structural irony. For instance, in the novel Lord of the Flies, the transformation of its leading characters from a group of naive and innocent children into a gang of bloodthirsty barbarians after their departure from the adult world has highlighted the novel’s motif of evil humanity. In his another novel The Inheritors, the cruelty and absurdity of civilization is fully exposed through the shift of the perspective from simple-minded, kind-hearted primitives to a more mature but more evil civilized man. In the novel Pincher Martin, Martin’s image as heroic Robinson Crusoe with indomitable will forms a vivid contrast with the image of greedy villain. All the ironies prevailing in these novels have created a powerful tension field, numerously extended the interpretation space of these novels and deepened their connotations.Section Four analyzes the contributing factors of Golding’s pessimistic consciousness. From the theoretical origin, Golding has been enormously influenced by the philosophical proposition of evil humanity in western philosophy history as well as classical Greek tragedy and deserted-island literature in western literature. Secondly, set in the western social context after the World War Two, Golding’s novels will undoubtedly be influenced by the historical background. As a result of the two world wars, nearly fifty million people were massacred and more people became homeless and severely wounded. What is worse, due to several severe economic crisis and the consequent mental panic and belief crisis, more and more people were possessed with such negative sentiments as they were suffering from their mental collapse and confusion about the reality. The basic elements of the value system such as right and wrong, good and evil, upright and shrew were blurring, so the entire value system that support human existence fell apart, and a full-scale crisis broke out within the realm of human cognition about the world and themselves. In addition, Golding’s writing was enormously influenced by his personal experiences of participation of the World War Two, nineteen-year teaching career, and his thinking about Christian doctrine particularly the theory of original sin.Section Five analyses the topic of redemption that is the underlying hope from Golding’s pessimistic consciousness. Golding devotes himself not only to the disclosure of evil humanity but also to a positive exploration into reconstruction of human nature. Golding’s disclosure of human nature is to appeal to a proper perception of the sad fact that man is endowed with cruelty and greed and to heal human ignorance of his innate nature so that human beings would build up adequate awareness and precaution of evil humanity. The true intention of Golding to fully expose evil humanity in a series of his novels is to enhance human awareness of his own imperfection through a face-to-face confrontation of the dark side of human nature rather than to display evil humanity merely for its own sake. However, the redemption road Golding points out for human beings is quite vague, even with sort of religious mysticism.As the concluding part, Section Six briefly introduces the characteristics of the times in Golding’s prime and the dominant literary trend. By analyzing the difference and relations between Golding’s earlier and later novels, this part indicates that his later novels carry forward the reflection of human nature and the concern of human future in his earlier novels. And on the base of exploring the abstract and transcendental evil humanity by allegory in his earlier novels, the later novels are the development of the earlier ones. They place human nature in social-historical environment, explore the complex of human nature by the experimental and realistic method. |
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