Name: Rajeev Chandra Prasad Visala
Country: India

Year: 2024
Volume: Volume-9, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 81-85

ABSTRACT
William Golding's principal novels illustrate a distressing progression from innocence to brutality, in
which the fragmentation of identity serves as the primary catalyst for human disintegration. This paper
examines this motif in four important works: Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher
Martin (1956), and Free Fall (1959). It shows how initial states of pure selfhood break down when
faced with innate primal forces, societal voids, and existential challenges. In Lord of the Flies,
youthful innocence disintegrates into tribal savagery, revealing the vulnerability of civilised identity.
The Inheritors contrasts Neanderthal communal purity with Homo sapiens' predatory egoism,
highlighting the loss of evolutionary identity. Pincher Martin depicts the hallucinatory disintegration
of a solitary individual, wherein wartime trauma leads to the dissolution of the ego into mythic
oblivion. Free Fall examines artistic and moral identity in the context of historical atrocity, resulting in
a state of existential authenticity. This analysis, utilising psychoanalytic, existential, and thematic
perspectives, elucidates Golding's critique of identity as a deceptive refuge against savagery,
suggesting its dissolution is unavoidable without transformative introspection. Golding's stories, which
came from his disappointment after World War II, are strong allegories for the constant fall of humans
from grace to chaos.
Keywords: William Golding, innocence to savagery, identity disintegration, primal regression, ethical
collapse, Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin