Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

74
William Golding
He also suff ers terribly, but unlike Prometheus, and like the suff ering
millions of the modern world, he does not know why he suff ers. Yet,
he is accepted by the readers as a modern Prometheus because he is a
creation of the world they themselves belong to. And like Pincher, too,
they do not know the reason behind their suff erings that the modern
life-style has infl icted them with.
On December 10, 1950, in his acceptance speech to the Nobel
Academy, referring to the impending Cold War and constant fear,
William Faulkner said, “the young man or woman writing today has
forgotten the problems of the human heart in confl ict with itself
which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing
about, worth the agony and the sweat.” 1 Indeed, the theme lying at
the center of Modern literature is the suff ering of the human mind,
and the soul struggling with itself. Th is idea explains why the fi gure of
Prometheus—the archetypal symbol of suff ering humanity, has always
been so attractive to writers and critics of all ages. Twentieth century
men and women often pride themselves on their sense of privacy, and
of the progress they have made in the fi eld of communication. But
what they have achieved amount only to screens that have shut off
their thoughts and feelings. Th ey have managed to lock themselves
up in their purgatories, with only occasional social calls made at each
other’s drawing rooms. Th ey are, as writers such as Eliot, Conrad, and
Greene have suggested, afraid of one another and of human relationships,
and thus they identify themselves with Prometheus in their
suff erings, paying the price of knowledge and aspiration.
Golding was a theologist with an aversion to the theories practiced
by Darwin, Marx and Freud. In the last chapter of their book,
Oldsey and Weintraub note that Golding did not consider it proper
to look for a pattern in every fi eld of life. In particular, he disliked
Freud’s various theories of psychological confl icts and interpretations.
But myth critics like Frye and Campbell have suggested that
“the myth critic sees the work holistically, as the manifestation of
vitalizing, integrative forces arising from the depths of humankind’s
collective psyche” (Guerin et al 167). Consciously or unconsciously,
Golding himself set patterns while drawing and sketching his
characters. For example, his Promethean characters usually have
borrowed identities. We never come to know the real name of Piggy.
Christopher Martin becomes Pincher Martin when he joins the
navy. Golding’s last hero Ionides is mostly known by the name of