Disenchantment and Re-enchantment in the work of William Golding

Abstract

This thesis argues that one of William Golding’s primary motivations in writing his fiction was to reawaken in his readers a sense of the world’s strangeness and mystery. The prevailing view among critics is that the atrocities committed during the Second World War made Golding into a pessimist. Consequently, his novels have been read as allegories of the human condition, with scant regard paid to his daring use of figurative language in his descriptive writing. I argue instead that Golding’s experiences in the navy gave him a renewed appreciation of the natural world’s beauties and terrors, and this fed directly into both his fictional and non-fictional writings. I formulate an analytic framework as an aid to understanding the changes and continuities between the first five novels which Golding published. It shows how his principal characters go through three distinct stages of development: first, the stage of enchantment, a state of dependence and belief in the supernatural; then the stage of disenchantment, a state marked by disillusionment and alienation; finally, the stage of re-enchantment, in which the capacity for wonder is reawakened through an epiphanic vision. This approach to the novels builds off the literary and philosophical context of disenchantment: namely, the view that advances in science and technology have stripped the natural world of its mystery and have stultified the creative imagination. My thesis charts the development of Golding’s early fiction and demonstrates how he became increasingly interested in probing the wellsprings of creativity, which he believed to be connected to a feminine principle in nature. This thesis presents an original assessment of Golding’s work, one which draws on unpublished archival materials and which pays greater attention to his complex use of metaphor, motif, and rhetorical schemes.