Fable to Myth in the Novels of William Golding

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E m ,According to the records at the Jabalpur Museum, Mangal was to be executed on April 18, but he was hanged at Barrackpor"e (w.B) on April gth, 10

days earlier to prevent the regiment harbouring ill-wili against superiors. He was hanged in front of lndian soldiers in a ground where a new house had been constructed for the execution of Mangal pandey .
Thu;s, This is the story of the illustrious son of Bharat Mata and his drearn of complete freedom.D

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REEEBENEESj naia Rao, Kanthapura , Madras, Oxford i.Jr.:iversity press
1994 (English tmpression )
GoswamiTulsidas . Ram Charit ln4anas ,Grta [-]ress Gorakhpur
Shyam'Dua .The luminous Iife of flv{angal pandey ,
Tiny Tot Publication , Delhi
Anita Gaur: Mangal Pandey

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,FABLE TO MYTH'IN
THE NOVELS
OF WILI.IAM GOLDING

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* Prakash Bhadury prakashbhadury@grnail.com I
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Witiiu"n Golding as a novelist is unique among the contemporaries of
50s and he continues to be one of tre most popular novelists in the present century for his consistent argument with human values. Golding is termed as allegorical novelist, fabulist, anthropologist of imagination and a myth maker.
The present paper seeks to find the fabulist as myth maker. A detailed survey of his fiction shows that he is deeply concerned with the moral chaos and vacuurn of his time. ln faith, he is neither a puritan nor a transcendentalist. His religir:n

is based upon the interpretation of his own experience of lifetime .His noyels dealwith the basic questions of life, and its goal in a universe of cosmic chaos.
He has dealt with the depravity of man and 'cares cjeepty about the condition of hurnan Iife, and shows great compassion for men who suffer and men who sin'1.

'Myth is an image, an action out of which truth emerges,.2 Myths is events, happenings larger than itself. The fable is a rnoral to which fictional circumstances must be accommodated. li's always a litile less than itself, better than a sermon, but quite not so real as history. So the fabulist as
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teaches English at Kumaon Engineering College, Almora, U.p., lndia
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artist is half doomed from the start. Golding himself has admitted in his BBC intervielv that: 'What I would regard as tremendous compliment to myself would be if someone would substitute the word "myth" for "fable"3. He feels that fable is

an invented thing on the surface whereas myth is sornething which comes oui frorn the roots of things in its ancient sense as a key to existence. lt'-q ihe whole

meaning of life and exper!ence as a whole.
His first and most successful novel tlre l-ord of

th* Flies is a gripping

story of smali school boys placed in isolation on an Edenic island beyond the reach of adult world and let them work out archetypal patterns of human society.
It is a technical device of coherence to rnake a perrnanent appeal to generaiions

of readers. The boat- shaped island represents all mankind on their journey' through iife and the snrall boys are the people at large who realize it from their own encounter.ln The lnherdfors he made his thesis statement that our developed

consciousness is mark of guilt or else, why the innocent Neanderthais would be extinct againsi the intelligent homo sapiens? Our experience is fragmented and to iniegrate this !s to return to the Neanderthal people, to innocence. Modern

world and science, so io say, have glfted us the myth of progress, not rrithout the rival myth of universal guilt. Golding accepts guilt and evil as a necessary condition of life; he also believes in redemption. and dlvine mercy. The characters in his novels depict all the tensions and fragmentations The fragments fornn part of the whole in which truth is accessible. lt's the myth of total explanation.
He sharply deviates from Hobbesian view of man .Sometimes his novels are termed as pessimistic or dystopian. He does not espouse 'Schopenhauerian form of pessimism'a expecting that mankind will cease to desire life and its continuation. That man is essentially a fallen being, is not a labyrinth of self defeating nihilism. He is closer to meliorism. He has chosen a darker version of meliorism, for it exactly suits the gloom and vacuum through which the world has been passing since the world war. The saving grace of Sammy Mountjoy and of the world depicted in Free Fal/ lies in the potential for compassion and communication. Sammy could not rnount in joy, rather descended into sorrow.
The whole problem was of free choice, free will and his fall is the fail of everyman.

Free fall, perhaps, is the best of the lot in which epiphany occurs at the last moment in the darkness of a cell iir a Nazi prison camp. ln tlre face of evil and

doom in the world hurnan being rnust do the

little

slhe can. Sammy did this

through his prayer. The dead Pincher Martin contrnued to hold on to tire dreary rock in the ocean, as if he was alive, through his ravenous ego and he failed.

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O,-e snould have hope and faith on anotherlife in anotherworld. Thus, Golding
G'eates the myth of human struggle 'with Being, not Becoming's

Goiding maintains a constant system of symbolism that allows for

a egorrcal meaning. He has created modern fabulations which tend away from
-epresentation of reality but returns i(:,vord actual human life by way of ethically

:c-rroiled fantasy. Allegories are a for:^n of extended metaphor in which action, persons, meanings etc. lie outside the narrative itself. His allegories as found in his series of novels are on man's propensity to evil as 'a bee produces honey'6.
He deviates from the optimisrn of evolutionary progress of Darwin or Huxley. His

allegories on man's inherent imperfection are not something original, but it has

tr t to be stated differently in different times.

E d conflicting ideas and philosophies exist in tension. The mutually oppoSDd ideas,

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There is no straight forward answer to what man's nature is. The message in

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Golding novel is not a straight forward account for; there is always an alternative

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answer or solution. Human being is neithef fully rational nor fully irrational. Both

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will and fate, chance or action plays its role in life. So, he creates a myth of a

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concrete situation in which different conflicting ideas are in tension. The situation

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is of prime importance. The process of interpretation plays a great role. The

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Spire is the diagram of prayer, but built on ill gotten money. lt also symbolizes

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the phallus. The end in Jocelyn's life is both visionary and equivocal. Like his

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own life he dies with unresolved tension and dies like a bird shouting, screaming

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Golding's vision of the world is a complex one in which a number of the dichotomy of good and evil are complex in their preseniation and coexistence.

to leave behind the world of magic and incomprehension. He realizes: 'Now-l

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know nothing at all.' Rifes of Passagethe first book of the trilogy won the Man

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Booker award in 198Oand deals with Talbot's reversion to savagery in the wake

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d an- * d b ry of isolation. ln the beginning of the Lord of the Flies Simon is quiet and retained; he never really voices his opinion. He represents the innocence on the island as

well as a Christ like figure" His death assists in the fall of civilization and the loss of innocence as Ralph and Jack lack the balance in coping with their environment. He even shows this when he isolates himself in a glade in the forest, which somewhat appears as a church. Finally, William Golding explains the fall of civilization on the island through the boys' primitive way of life.

Golding novels are simpie in so far they deal with the primordial patterns

J q- of human experience in a cloak of a fable. But the narratives slowly moves to
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worNds, worlds of myth to reverberaie wiihin our being to seek the pattern the way $ar^nmy at one stage finds no bricige yet, seeks forgiveness and walks intc

the world of vlsicn. Rousseau, the pr:iiiicai scientisi, pointed eut thai society whereas Gclding fable proves that it's man that corrupts the society.
Here iies the visionary power of the n'ran who is now in the haiiowerj precrr.icts of

coc"r'upts rnan

noveiist as theologisi with his myth of total exsianation. E
REEEF-ESGE$i
1.i C.B.Cox "Cn Lord of the Flies", Wiitiarn Gclciing;: I,Jcuets, .tSS4
Book Sei-ies, ed" A. E Dyson {Maerniilen, l$95},.

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3" Frank Kermcde. "Goldrng's intellectuatr Econarty", witiiarn Gcidiirg:

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