An Allegory Of Modernity--A Reinterpretation Of William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

The paper, which consists of five parts, is a reinterpretation of the celebrated novel Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding, the English novelist.In introduction, It describes the condition of the studies of Lord of the Flies by Chinese and foreign researchers and major problems about them, analyzes the problems and explores how to resolve them, by way of which the principle of the paper's approach and frame is expounded: It is faced with the historical context of modernity that Golding thoughts and writes, and the text of his Lord of the Flies is fabricated of the impersonal narrative discourses belonging to historical category and lying homologous to modernity taken as cultural or social text.The first chapter is the analysis of the narrative grammar of Lord of the Flies. It first defines the functional characters of the novel by virtue of Greimas's actantial model, then by the close reading of the characters i.e. the study of the actualization of structural possibilities conditioned by history in the text, shows that its narrative grammar is a model of the incomplete narrative of the modernity of Enlightenment, and finally explores the paradoxical narrative traces, so as to discover the novel's synchronic representation of the history in which social modernization obstructs and distorts cultural modernity.The second chapter is the analysis of the metaphorical system. Seen from the perspective of the metaphor as a mode of discursive development, the frame ofmeanings of Lord of the Flies is constituted of three metaphorical chains whose central images are respectively the "shell", the "glasses" and the "beast". "Beast" is not such a symbolic entity signifying abstract "human evil" as most of researchers take for granted, but an "other" mirroring the concrete mode of human existence. And the interrelation between it and two other central images presents the tenor of the metaphorical system-the crisis of modern existence.The third chapter is the analysis of the polyphony. Lord of the Flies has apparent polyphonic style characterized by carnivalesque artistic time-space and macrodialogic open structure, but microdialogue, the most precise formal mark of polyphonic novel, can hardly be found in it. The meaningful total form in question is analyzed by referring to the cultural tenor of Bakhtin's polyphonic theory and is discovered to correspond to the reification and non-subjectivity of modern man which the former chapter shows. In the novel only Simon and Ralph indicate the characteristics of dialogic subject, and the latter's survival and mature through calamity means a hope in despair: after all man and his history are incomplete.The conclusion is that Lord of the Flies is an allegory of modernity in terms of not only its representation of modernity but also the modernity of its own allegorical form.