Pincher Martin

The action in these early chapters and the dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness narrative become clearer in the context of the book’s twist ending. In the final chapter, a Navy officer retrieves Martin’s body from an island where it washed ashore. Martin still has his seaboots on, indicating that everything that happened after he supposedly kicked them off was a fantasy. The rock and the days and weeks Martin spent there were mere hallucinations, which his mind compressed into his final dying moments.

Golding offers clues that the narrative may not reflect reality (such as the allusion to Martin’s mind remaining active long after his body lay still). However, this doesn’t mean that Golding set out to construct a puzzle-box narrative and encourage readers to piece it together to anticipate the twist ending. Rather, the ending and the clues exist to develop the book’s themes and characterization, as Golding explained to a radio host in 1958: “[Martin’s] drowned body lies rolling in the Atlantic but the ravenous ego invents a rock for him to endure on.” (Carey, John. William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. Faber & Faber. 2009.)

That ego goes by different names over the novel’s course. The first sentence refers to it as “the centre.” Other times, Martin simply calls it his “personality,” which in Freudian terms would indicate his ego. Martin often retreats into this centre or personality when in extraordinary pain, and here, inside this “dark skull,” virtually the entire narrative takes place.

At what point the narrative transitions from “reality” to Martin’s fantasy is unclear. It must occur before Page 6, when he kicks off his seaboots; beyond that point, the demarcation between reality and illusion becomes more ambiguous. Given the unspecified yet clearly haunting maternal trauma Martin experienced in his youth, the transition may be when, on Page 4, he cries for his mother—a cry abbreviated to “Moth—” because of the icy waves crashing over his head. Knowing he is about to die before reckoning with this unresolved trauma, Martin’s ego takes control and hurtles him into an elaborate fantasy before he has a chance to acknowledge his own demise.

Once the fantasy begins—at least in these initial chapters—the book resembles a more traditional survival narrative, albeit one told through nontraditional literary devices. For example, Golding conveys Martin’s inner life using stream-of- consciousness techniques, by which the character’s thoughts, emotions, and memories flow forth, often with little logic or order. Still, the action itself is what one might expect from a survival adventure. Martin washes up on the rock’s shores; competently secures food, water, and shelter; and creates an apparatus to attract passing planes and ships. To readers, such narratives are familiar and stirring, as they exist in many works of Western fiction, like Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. The will to survive impossible odds is among Western literature’s most established themes, and audiences typically root for characters whose actions express that theme. As such, Martin quickly becomes a hero who is easy to identify with and support. In turn, it makes sense that Martin would cast himself as such a heroic and familiar character trope in the fantasy he creates.

However, the narrative gradually reveals Martin’s will to survive as the grotesque arrogance of an utter scoundrel, untethered from reality. These chapters merely gesture at that truth through a handful of passages that suggest Martin’s true nature. For example, his outburst cursing the Navy and the war shows that he may not be the kind of unquestionably courageous military hero who often populates World War II narratives. What drives Martin’s survival instinct is not courage but pompous self-love and an impulse toward conquest. Martin’s “extraordinary capacity to endure” (58), as Nathaniel puts it, stems largely from his inability to imagine a world in which he doesn’t exist. Given his hopelessly empty spiritual and emotional life, heaven or whatever else may follow death will be a “sheer negation” of the self, according to Nathaniel, that leaves no soul to inhabit the afterworld. Here, Golding introduces “black lightning” to symbolize a negating force, which will reemerge during the book’s chaotic and surreal climax.