Same Stylistic Features In William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies is the masterpiece of William Golding who is a famous writer in Britishcontemporary literature and winner of Nobel Prize in1983. Lord of the Flies is a philosophicalnovel which reveals the evil of human being through describing the innocence of the children.Scholars at home and abroad all show great interests in it, many studies have been done inanalyzing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Among those researches, the themes of the novelare the most popular one. Of course, there are others, for example, researches on the narrativestructure, researches from the myth archetypal perspective, from the psychoanalytic criticismaspect, from the feminist approach and anti-Utopian aspect. However, there are still fewresearches from the stylistic theory. With the development of stylistics, it has become anindependent discipline and stylistic analysis is becoming an important way in literatureappreciation, so this thesis tries to apply speech act theory and stylistic deviation in analyzingWilliam Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The thesis aims to discover how speech act theory andstylistic deviation are embodied in Lord of the Flies, it is hoped that readers understand the novelbetter.The thesis is composed of four parts: introduction, literary review, two chapters andconclusion. Introduction is about the status of William Golding and the main idea of the novel, aswell as the significance of the study. Chapter two deals with the review and development of boththe work and the theory at home and abroad. Chapter three and four are the body of the thesis.Chapter three analyzes Lord of the Flies from two levels: macro speech acts and micro speechacts. At macro speech acts level, the author illustrates from three aspects, they are temporalsetting, spacial setting and the theme of the novel. These three elements are an organic unity topresent the deep theme of the novel. At micro speech acts level, the author divides the charactersinto three groups to analyze their different personalities: characters in good group, the twoleaders in good and bad group, all characters in both good and bad groups. These descriptionsvividly show the characteristics of the persons and push the novel develop. Chapter fourendeavors to explore how deviation used in Lord of the Flies by William Golding, includingsurface structure deviation (repetition, impossible situation and the violation of grammar) anddeep structure deviation (symbolism, metaphor and irony). These devices not only manifestGolding’s higher technique, but also add some interesting effects on the novel. Chapter five isthe conclusion of the study.According to the stylistic study in this thesis, readers can find William Golding’s Lord ofthe Flies does not have some complicated grammatical structures and discourse arrangements, sothere is no difficulty in reading it. However, these common words or phrases shock people a lot. Because the choices of time, space and setting not only add the allegorical color of the novel, butalso deepen the theme of the novel. In addition, the communications and dialogues of thecharacters in the novel vividly show their characteristics, pushing the development of the plot ofthe novel. Golding uses a large number of deviations including repetition, symbolism, irony andso on. These devices contribute a lot to express the author’s writing technique and transfer histhoughts exactly. And that is one of the reasons that his novel can win Nobel Prize and always beregarded as a western textbook. Golding’s unique writing skill and brave imagination makes himthe title of “fable compiler” in the west.