William Golding’s Apocalyptic Vision in Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin

of a Golden Age. While the English Romantic poets like Shelley saw hopes of a new
millennium in poems like “Queen Mab” and “ e Revolt of Islam”, others like Blake
developed their own unique “cosmology” in their longer poems that were nevertheless
coloured with their vision of redemption and damnation. Even Hollywood movies,
like  e Book of Eli (2010), rehearse this theme of salvation in the face of imminent
annihilation time and again. Keeping with such trends, this paper would like to
trace this line of apocalyptic vision and subsequent hopes of renewal with reference to
William Golding’s debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and his Pincher Martin
(1956). While in the former, a group of young school boys indulge in violence, fi rstly
for survival, and then for its own sake, in the latter, a lonely, shipwrecked survivor of
a torpedoed destroyer clings to his own hard, rock-like ego that subsequently is a hurdle
for his salvation and redemption, as he is motivated by a lust for life that makes him
exist in a diff erent moral and physical dimension. In Lord of the Flies, the entire
action takes place with nuclear warfare presumably as its backdrop, while Pincher
Martin has long been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and the resultant
fear of annihilation from nuclear fallout (this applies to Golding’s debut novel as
well).  us, this paper would argue how Golding weaves his own vision of social,
spiritual, and metaphysical dissolution, and hopes for redemption, if any, through
these two novels.