"Fiction in the Wild, Modern Manner": Metanarrative Gesture in William Golding's To the End of the Earth Trilogy
1992; Duke University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/441620
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoWhile moral concern and an interest in exploring generic limits have characterized Golding's since his early fiction of the mid-1950s, his recently completed sea trilogy, comprised of Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989), despite its nearly nine-hundred pages, large cast of characters, and variety of incident, seems a deliberate, almost obsessional, return to earlier meditations on such topics as fiction and history, the basis of an authentic moral self, the nature of social institutions, and the individual's place in them. The territory Golding set out to explore and claim in Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors remains, then, the bedrock of his matured creative interests. Although his resolve to survey the same large area of moral concern appears to confirm the essentially conservative, even possibly static, cast of his imagination, Golding has increasingly asserted an apparently contradictory preoccupation with the nature of representation and the fictive. Thus while the trilogy centrally aims at demonstrating the potential limits of writing about writing, its insistent and accumulated detail contrarily affirms the traditional aim of realism in convincing the reader of the reality of a created world.
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