Name: Rajeev Chandra Prasad Visala
Country: India

Year: 2025
Volume: Volume-10, Issue-2 (July-December)
Page Number: 77-81
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17815598

ABSTRACT
William Golding's fiction constructs isolated "fear spaces", liminal environments such as islands and
rocks, that evoke the Freudian uncanny, disrupting conventional subjectivity and reconfiguring the self
through encounters with the repressed and the unknown. This paper explores these dynamics across
three novels: Lord of the Flies (1954), Pincher Martin (1956), and The Inheritors (1955). In Lord of
the Flies, the tropical island morphs from an Edenic refuge to an uncanny labyrinth, where fear
amplifies the boys' fragmented subjectivities into primal collectives. Pincher Martin transforms a
jagged rock into a solipsistic uncanny domain, wherein the protagonist's hallucinatory projections
shatter egoic coherence amid existential dread. The Inheritors recasts prehistoric landscapes as fearinfused terrains, alienating Neanderthal consciousness through sapiens' invasive gaze, thus fracturing
holistic subjectivity. Employing psychoanalytic and spatial theories, this analysis reveals Golding's
fear spaces as uncanny islands that expose subjectivity's precarious architecture: terror's irruption
compels reconfiguration, yielding insights into post-war alienation and ecological rupture. Golding's
configurations ultimately caution that unnavigated uncanny encounters precipitate subjective
dissolution, underscoring the self's entanglement with spatial hauntings.
Keywords: William Golding, Fear space, Uncanny island, Subjectivity configurations, Spatial
psychoanalysis, Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin, The Inheritors