Will, Suffering and Liberation in William Golding’s The Spire.
Keywords:
William Golding, Arthur Schopenhauer, will, suffering, aesthetics, deathAbstract
Although William Golding’s The Spire has been submitted to frequent analyses, none has explained one of its central elements: the will that the protagonist identifies with that of God. First illustrating this general weakness through a well-known reading of the novel, this article then attempts a more comprehensive interpretation, focused on the primacy of the will, with the aid of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer’s theory throws light on the uneasy relations between the intellectual perspectives adopted by the two main characters, Dean Jocelin (a religious man with a vision) and Roger Mason (the builder who puts his technical expertise at the Dean’s service) on the spire that gives the novel its title. More importantly, it can help us to see how both perspectives serve the all-powerful, amoral will that also fuels Jocelin’s sexual desire and underlies the world as a whole. In Golding’s novel, as in Schopenhauer, the insatiable quality of willing causes widespread suffering, but Jocelin’s involuntary liberation from the force of will (thanks to his aesthetic contemplation of the spire and his subsequent demise) eventually puts an end to his pain.Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
