Psychological trauma in Goldings Pincher Martin

Golding is one of those writers who feel an urgent calling to delve deep beneath the surface of the patina of culture and manners and wants to reach an understanding which is at the core of original sin that moves man. In trying to analyze these issues, Golding became a prominent moralist-novelist. He views the average man as sick, a fallen being “with a sinful nature” and feels that “his spiritual state is perilous”. He declared himself a moralist and considered the novel a fit vehicle for expressing the terrible reality of Man’s moral condition. This article  will make a deep study of Sir William Golding’s life and the psychological and literary influences in his novel Pincher Martin that shaped his sensitivity and his creative genius. The novel Pincher Martin (1956) is set during World War II. In this novel a shipwrecked sailor named Pincher Martin imagines that he is clinging to a bare rock desperate to survive. His past is recalled; but at the end it is learnt that he died in the wreck and that the whole recollection had taken place at the point of drowning. This changes the work into a religious allegory of purgatory and damnation. It develops the theme of cruelty as the basic nature of mankind, underneath a thin veneer of civilization. This article will highlight the fact that the consciousness of man is so self-centred, and he is so terrified of the infinite that it creates for itself a fantasy existence even in death and wants to enjoy the luxury of personal identity. The concept lends itself to deep psychoanalytical interpretation.

Keywords: Psychoanalytic, Allegory, Purgation, Self-Reconstitution, Symbolism, Trauma.