If, as Yeats claimed, a source of literature is the author's argument with himself, William Golding's success as a novelist is easy to account for. When he was young, as he has said many times, he was a political liberal who believed that the human condition could be ameliorated by social action. Redistribute the wealth and abolish poverty: End poverty and eradicate crime. The fault was not in us, but in the system. Then came World War II and Golding underwent not so much a change of heart as of understanding. It was not, he said, that people were killing each other. As a classicist, he knew this had been going on for millennia. But the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, he thought, peculiar to our unhappy century; beyond that - and perhaps of most importance - he discovered during his service in the navy that his fellow countrymen were innately evil. Forced to live close to each other aboard ship, they lost their civilized veneer of manners and morals and grew petty, selfish, and sometimes vicious. Finally, Golding concluded that most people of whatever nationality were potential Nazis: England and America had escaped such a fate because of accidental turns in the historical process.
Such was the genesis of Lord of the Flies, Golding's first novel, which is the story of a group of boys placed on an edenic island beyond the influence of organized society. Here, as Golding meant for them to, they reprise the fall of man and the evil that follows. "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill," the Lord of the Flies says to Simon, the mystic. "You knew, didn't you? I'm a part of you?...I'm the reason why it's no go?" The boys make rules by which they hope to govern themselves, but their dark natures turn some of them into sadists and murderers. They kill first Simon and the Piggy, who represents the rational aspect of human nature, and are trying to kill Ralph, the hero of the narrative, when help arrives. That the book made Golding's point was evidenced by the mail he received congratulating him on telling the truth about people. But as he thought about the novel later, Golding was not entirely comfortable with what he had done. He continued to believe in original sin. But he believed too that the best way to deal with it was by a socialistic system, which, with modifications, was what he had believed before he wrote Lord of the Flies.
Golding's divided psyche is also present in the mystical force that pervades much of his other work. Pincher Martin, the story of a naval officer who dies in the war, is a direct and orthodox treatment of Christian eschatology. Christopher Martin is called "Pincher" because he pinches everything: the wives and sweethearts of his friends; the best parts of plays; notice from the powerful; fame; money. He compares himself to the last slug in a Chinese box, the one that has eaten all the others and grown fat. The story is a tour de force. What appears to be an account of Martin's effort to survive on a rock in the ocean after his ship has been torpedoed is discovered at the end of the book to be his judgment, his ultimate rejection of God's grace. The theology could not be more conventional. Martin is possessed by pride and gluttony. His determination to survive on his rock is the chronicle of his refusal to submit his ego to the will of God. He has damned himself by the life he has lived, by the persona his vices have created that cannot be changed in the moment of his dying.
Free Fall is about free will, the loss thereof, and the contending forces of empirical science and religious mystery. At the beginning of the story, Sammy Mountjoy is exploring his
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