William Golding’s artistic responsibility borders on a deep type of moral responsibility towards fellow men whose consciences he is committed to awakening.
Using a weapon no more potent than the intricately crafted, sometimes factual and at all times deeply committed and serious novels, Golding has his fingers on the moral pulse of his time, trying to diagnose the divided, distorted, and dehumanized self of disease. essential of humanity.
Although he enjoyed overwhelming love and care at home, Golding could not help but be exposed to the darkness and terror of life by the compulsion to live a life of poverty. Over the years and his growing understanding, he came to realize that the world was far from being a place of ‘sanity, logic and fascination’ and from being ‘terrifying, evil, corrupt and sinful, which was further strengthened. more for their services in the world. marine and traumatic experiences during World War II. He was convinced that man was a fallen being trapped by original sin and has a sinful nature in a conversation with Jack I. Biles Golding said:
The basic point that my generation discovered about man was more evil in him than could be explained simply by social pressures.
Man is the author of his problems which, again, could be attributed to his selfish nature. Life would have been peaceful and happy if man had agreed to live in perfect harmony with nature. But this would be a difficult proposition. Man is happy only when he can establish his authority over others. Thus the temperamental compulsion to assert oneself, to see oneself as supreme even above the Almighty, results in hatred and fear that dominates life.
For Golding, the greatest downfall of man is to see the “Self” above all others, including the Almighty, but not ignorant of it. “I” becomes very important and takes precedence over all other things. It gives rise to the urge to develop and maintain your own identity. Self-assertion implies not merely “I am” but also “I am myself and not another.” The ” ‘I’ is not a simple self-identification, but also a state of separation from everything else. ” This emphasis on the “I” is in Golding’s view a rejection of God and the interrelation of one with the universe and the dependence of one on the other spiritual that man cannot understand or control.
The mere idea of a ‘Supreme Being’ whose restraining hand prevents him from reaching himself makes him rebel against that ‘Being’ and denies its existence. In a letter to John Peter Golding he wrote that man’s supreme failure lies in the fact that he opposes his own Maker: “ God is that from which we turn away from life and therefore we hate and fear him. and we make an inner darkness. . ”
Man has a constant fear of being harmed by the unknown. For this fragmented consciousness “the other” is incomprehensible. It is only imagined as darkness and it is a challenge to its ego-oriented existence. This lack of understanding of the other, this inability to overcome the other creates an inexplicable darkness, the inner darkness in the inner depths of man. Darkness that he is afraid of. This forces him in a state of confusion to always be at war with his environment. There is a natural chaos of existence, the absence of patterns of life pointed out by Talbot and realized by Sammy Mount Joy. Another variant of this is the “darkness of the heart of man” envisioned by Ralph, Jocelin and Colley. In the end, they experience a sense of their own “complicity with evil.” Again there is the fallen man’s sense of chaos, his sense of separation or alienation from the universe.
Science and technology, instead of being harnessed for the fulfillment of human aspirations and values, has only led to large-scale destruction leaving behind burned cities, homeless citizens, destitute and orphans as in visible Darkness. The emperor of The Brass Butterfly observes that scientific inventions have not been for the better until now ” (…) ” I like the old world. What does yours have to offer? A white explosion? Wheels like shark teeth! Restlessness, ferment, fever, dislocation, disorder, wild experiment and catastrophe? ”
To achieve true salvation one must reconcile with oneself and destroy oneself and awaken to divinity within oneself and others. Golding admires the most is the one who will look the dark in the face with great moral courage, accept the ignoble truth within him, which is potentially destructive to our humanity. It is a discomfort of the human conscience that objectifies evil – looks for it outside – instead of recognizing its subjectivity. In Rites of Passage, Robert James Colley writes to Esmond Talbot: “What one man does pollutes him, not what others do. Good and evil are within us.” This intellectual complication is the essential disease of humanity that Simon (Lord of the Flies) discovers in the severed head of the pig. Man prefers to destroy the objectification of his fear rather than acknowledge the evil within himself.
Golding is a religious writer, his religion is based on the relationship of man with God and society. His novels constitute a moral theater in which the tragic drama of man’s desire to make sense of the chaos, created by himself, is represented. In Golding’s view, the man lacks vision. In each of his novels he threw an effort to bridge the gulf between the physical world that he ignores. By setting himself the formidable task of giving artistic expression to his experience and outlook on life, Golding has rightly earned a place of distinction among writers of novels with deep moralistic significance.