An Intertextual Reading Of William Golding’s Free Fall

William Golding is well-known as an English novelist in the 20 th century, and he has enjoyed great prestige for his masterpiece Lord of the Flies which is the winner of Nobel Prize in Literature laureate in the year of 1983. William Golding is a unique writer for his concentration on everlasting motif about evil and treachery of humanity and the religious experience of man in almost all his novels. As his fourth novel, Free Fall was published in 1959. It presents the protagonist’s quest for self-knowledge and retrospection for the moment when he has lost his freedom and fallen into irretrievable guilt. This novel has been interpreted by foreign scholars from different perspectives; nevertheless, few scholars have explored the intertextual elements in this novel. In China, this novel itself has not received much attention.In this thesis, the author intents to interpret this novel from the perspective of intertextuality, concerning the corresponding intertextual relations with Biblical elements, Golding’s other famous novels, and Golding’s biographically personal experience, moreover, extending to the historical criticism. Through the full range of analysis, it is possible to grasp the essence of motif, characterization, and narration of this novel.The thesis altogether consists of six parts: namely, introduction, four chapters of the body and conclusion.The introduction is firstly a brief summary of William Golding’s life and his outstanding contribution to the history of English literature. Moreover, it contains a generalization of the excellent story in Free Fall and the literature review of previous researches on this novel. This chapter gives a comprehensive introduction to this novel and highlights the significance of William Golding’s reflection on human being’s evil nature and living conditions.Chapter One functions as the theoretical foundation of the thesis, which focuses on the development and practice of the intertextuality. The notion of intertextuality is quite popular in postmodernist theory. The term was first put forward in 1969 by Julia Kristeva who pioneered the theoretical framework of intertextuality mainly under the influence of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Intertextuality refers to a method that juxtaposes texts in order to discover points of similarities and differences as well as the belief that all texts and ideas are part of a fabric of historical, social, ideological, and textual relations.Chapter Two illustrates how the theme of Free Fall forms an intertextual structure with the Bible. The physical and spiritual fall of Samuel Mountjoy(Sammy) resembles the chapter of “The Fall” in Genesis, which relates the sin of Adam and Eve. And the innocent childhood of Sammy is an allusion to Eden; the protagonist’s quest for self-knowledge is also the process of revealing his fallen experience in bringing about Beatrice’s misfortune. All of these clarify the essentially guilty root for his loss of freedom that presents as the fallen motif of this novel.Based on the “isolated-island” mode and unique characterization in William Golding’s novels, Chapter Three analyzes the novel in intertextuality with Golding’s other novels, mainly Pincher Martin and The Spire. Part one discusses time isolation, space isolation and self isolation, covering the interaction of objective and subjective separated condition that brings about characters’ secretly mental activity. Part Two concentrates on the female characters among these novels, especially Beatrice Ifor in Free Fall as a parody of Dante’s Beatrice, furthermore illustrates the intertextual relationships between female characters in Golding’s novels and Mollie Evans in Golding’s personal life. This chapter of the thesis displays the consistency and uniqueness in characterization.Chapter Four focuses on the illustration of historical intertextuality in narration of this novel. It covers firstly the conflict in choice of “pattern” concerning Sammy’s world views, which originates from the differences between rationalism and religion; secondly, the intertextuality with historical events during wartime implies Golding’s meditation on catastrophe of human culture, and reexamines the relations between individual and history; thirdly, the intertextual relation between fiction and reality from the perspective of metacriticism, which aims to arouse the critical thinking for fictional narration in Free Fall and this design predicts an experimenting overture of metafiction in Golding’s novels.The last chapter serves as the conclusion, indicating that the intertextual interpretation of Free Fall is a pertinent method to display the urgency of individual responsibility and Golding’s criticism of human nature, concerning egoism, invalid communication and exploitation of others. What’s more, the involvement of historicity in metafictional elements arouses the critical thinking of historical cognition, based on the relations between individual and history. This thesis proves that intertextuality is a feasible perspective to interpret novels, and this method can highlight the profound motif and realistic significance of literary texts.