i

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CHILDHOOD

IN GOLDING’S LORD OF THE FLIES AND
SALINGER’S THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
(Master’s Thesis)
Işıl BOZKURT
Kütahya - 2006
 ii

T.R.

DUMLUPINAR UNIVERSITY

Institute of Social Sciences

Division of Western Languages and Literature

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CHILDHOOD IN GOLDING’S LORD

OF THE FLIES AND SALINGER’S THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

(Master’s Thesis)

Thesis Advisor

Asst. Prof. Ceyhun AKSOY

Işıl BOZKURT

0392071106

Kütahya - 2006
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Kabul ve Onay

Işıl BOZKURT’un hazırladığı “A Comparative Study of Childhood in

Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye” başlıklı tez
çalışması, jüri tarafından lisansüstü yönetmeliğin ilgili maddelerine göre değerlendirilip
kabul edilmiştir.

/ / 2006

Tez Jürisi

Prof. Dr. Burçin EROL (Başkan)

Yard. Doç. Dr. Ceyhun AKSOY (Danışman)

Yard. Doç Dr. Sezer Sabriye İKİZ (Üye)

Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Müdürü

Prof. Dr. Ahmet KARAASLAN
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Yemin Metni

Yüksek Lisans tezi olarak sunduğum, “A Comparative Study of Childhood in

Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye” adlı çalışmanın,
tarafımdan bilimsel ahlak ve geleneklere aykırı düşecek bir yardıma başvurmaksızın
yazıldığını ve yararlandığım kaynakların kaynakçada gösterilenlerden oluştuğunu,
bunlara atıf yapılarak yararlanılmış olduğunu belirtir ve bunu onurumla doğrularım.

Işıl BOZKURT
/ /2006
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ÖZGEÇMİŞ

27.08.1980 yılında Kütahya’da doğdu. 1991 yılında 19 Mayıs İlkokulu’ndan

mezun olduktan sonra orta öğrenimine Atatürk Lisesi’nde devam etti. 1998 yılında
Anadolu Güzel Sanatlar Lisesi’nden mezun olarak aynı yıl Dumlupınar Üniversitesi
Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatı Bölümü, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Ana Bilim Dalı’nda
üniversite eğitimine başladı. 2002 yılında mezun olarak 2003 yıllında aynı bölümde
Yüksek Lisans programına başladı. 2002 yılından itibaren Dumlupınar Üniversitesi’nde
okutman olarak çalışmaktadır.

Işıl BOZKURT
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CURRICULUM VITAE

Born in Kütahya on 27.08.1980. Completed her primary education at 19 Mayıs

Primary School in 1992, and her secondary education at Atatürk High School and Fine
Arts Anatolian High School in 1998. Began her university education at the Department
of Western Languages and Literature at Dumlupınar University in 1998.Received her
Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature in 2002. Since 2003 she is
an MA student at the Department of Western Languages and Literature at Dumlupınar
University. Presently works as a lecturer at the Department of Western Languages and
Literature, Dumlupınar University.

Işıl BOZKURT
 vii

ÖZET

Bu çalışma William Golding’in Lord of the Flies adlı eseri ile Jerome David
Salinger’ın The Catcher in the Rye adlı eserindeki çocukluk olgusuna karşılaştırmalı bir
yaklaşım sunmaktadır. Edebiyatta Çocuk ve Çocukluk başlıklı birinci bölüm, çocukluk
miti ile çocuk motifini hem genel bir edebi öğe olarak hem de Anglo-Amerikan
edebiyatındaki yansımalarıyla teorik ve eleştirel açılardan tartışmaya açmaktadır.
Golding ve Salinger’da Çocukluğun İki Yönlü Temsili adlı ikinci bölüm ise çocukluk
mitinin hem yıkımı hem de devamı üzerine odaklanır. Bu bakımdan Lord of the Flies
adlı eser, insanoğlunun kalbinin kötü yanlarını açığa çıkarması ve çocukluk mitini sona
erdirmesi bakımından, The Catcher in the Rye adlı eser de çocukluk mitini koruması ve
devam ettirmesi bakımından ele alınmıştır.

Çocukluk miti genel anlamda Batı ve özel anlamda da İngiliz edebiyatında

önemli bir edebi gelenek olarak yer etmiştir. Yazarların çocukluk deneyimlerine olan
ilgilerinin başlangıcı ve bu ilginin sağlamlaşması Romantik dönem ile Viktorya
döneminde gerçekleşmiştir. Bu konuya olan ilgi 20. yüzyılda da devam etmiş ve İkinci
Dünya Savaşı sonrası dönemde Amerikalı yazar Salinger, çocukluğun naifliği ve saflığı
barındırdığı görüşünü korumaktayken, İngiliz yazar Golding, çocukluk deneyimlerinin
insan kalbinin karanlık yüzünü ve insan masumiyetinin sona erişini açığa çıkaracağını
savunarak çocukluk mitini yok etmeyi hedeflemiştir. Bu bakımdan her iki yazar çocuk
ve çocukluk olgularına farklı iki yaklaşımda bulunarak çocukluk mitine iki yönlü bir
bakış açısı getirmişlerdir.
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ABSTRACT

The present thesis represents a comparative approach to childhood in Lord of the

Flies by William Golding and The Catcher in the Rye by Jerome David Salinger.
Chapter 1, entitled The Child and Childhood in Literature, brings into discussion the
general theoretical and critical considerations of the myth of childhood and child motif
as a literary pattern in general and, in particular, the aspects of its literary reflection in
Anglo-American literature. Chapter 2, entitled The Dual Representation of Childhood in
Golding and Salinger, focuses on both the destruction and the continuation of the myth
of childhood, discusses Lord of the Flies which reveals the darkness of man’s heart and
the end of the myth of childhood, and The Catcher in the Rye which preserves the myth
of the childhood experience.

The myth of childhood has been established as an important literary tradition in

Western literature in general and in English literature in particular. The beginning and
the consolidation of the writers’ interest in the experience of childhood are to be found
in the Romantic and the Victorian period. The interest in this subject had an important
continuation in the 20th century literature as well, where, after World War II, Salinger
preserved the idea of the naivety and the purity of childhood, whereas Golding
attempted to destroy the myth of childhood by showing that the experience of the
childhood period would reveal the darkness of man’s heart, the end of human
innocence. Thus, both writers develop in literary terms a dual vision of the child and
childhood experience.
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CONTENTS

ÖZET............................................................................................................................ vii

ABSTRACT................................................................................................................. viii

INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER ONE
THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE
1.1. Child as Literary Motif ......................................................................................... 6
1.2. The Representation of Child and Childhood in Anglo-American Literature........ 15

CHAPTER TWO
THE DUAL REPRESENTATION OF CHILDHOOD IN GOLDING AND
SALINGER
2.1 William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the End of Innocence ............................ 34
2.2 J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and the Innocence Preserved ................... 48

CONCLUSION........................................................................................................... 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 70

INDEX......................................................................................................................... 74
10
 1

INTRODUCTION
 2

Considering the evolution of English literature, one can easily notice the
complexity of the literary expression of the figure of the child and the experience of
childhood, which stand as literary motifs and thematic concerns aimed by the writers at
reifying particular points of view.

The child and childhood became definite literary concerns in the Romantic
Movement, which continued and developed in the Victorian Age, and later in the 20th
century literature, allowing the consideration of such a concern as a literary myth, which
is the myth of childhood, and the child as the archetype of this myth.

With the Romantics, the child was conceived by writers as a central literary
motif within the framework of some definite themes organized around the child as a
symbol that in almost all texts (especially those by Blake and Wordsworth) stands for
innocence, purity, return to origins, and even as an aspect of the famous Romantic
Escapism, that is a return to the personal origins.

Such literary expressions of the child and childhood experience as an alternative

to the mature world, a return to primordial innocence, a source of basic human values
that are lost in the process of individual growth and development, and as a source of
happiness and accomplishment for the mature person could be found also in the novels
of the Victorian writers, such as in Dickens’ novels of character development David
Copperfield and Great Expectations.

Although it brings into discussion the earlier periods, the present thesis is a
research on the literary representation of the figure of the child and the experience of
childhood in the 20th century, and it focuses primarily on the status of the child in its
textual expression in two post-war novels: Lord of the Flies by William Golding and
The Catcher in the Rye by Jerome David Salinger.

William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is more than an allegorical analysis of
the causes of fascism and the horrors it created in the war; it is rather an analysis of how
the modern man loses his freedom to choose between good and evil, where the freedom
 3

takes the form of individual responsibility for not committing sin and doing evil to other
humans. Actually, William Golding’s fiction in general contains some major
philosophical issues that raise important awareness concerning human existence,
especially regarding the problem of the imperfection of human nature. This problem is
brought into discussion in its relation to the ethical categories of good and evil, where in
Lord of the Flies the use of children as the main characters allows Golding to
investigate the “evil side” of the human personality, and to develop his favorite theme,
which is the theme of the “darkness of the human heart”.

The modern man, according to Golding, is not able to understand himself and
does not want to understand the dark sides of his nature, being unaware that the dark
instincts of his personality emerge in certain situations of human interaction and lead to
social crisis. If the social factors are ignored, then the motives for the evil are in human
nature, in man himself, in his unconscious level. Hence the appropriateness of using one
of the major archetypes of the unconscious, that of the child, which would reveal that
neither men individually nor individual political systems are problematic, but men in
general; the mankind is sick, and that the main responsibility of the modern human
being is to diagnose this illness, and to treat its causes.

A similar picture of a period of crisis in the history of humanity, through the

figure of the child, is presented literary by another post-war writer, the American
novelist Jerome David Salinger. He belongs to a distinct group of talented American
writers who began their literary career during or immediately after the Second World
War, the so-called “young novelists”: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin,
William Styron, and others. Salinger wrote his best short stories, as well as his best
known novel, The Catcher in the Rye, in the late 40s and early 50s, which represented a
dramatic period in post-war America, when the country was confronted with serious
social and political problems.

The Catcher in the Rye deals with the problems of the post-war American young
generation: frustration, alienation, and inadaptability. Having the child and the
experience of childhood as central motifs, and portraying the world through the
 4

sensibility of a character facing the problems of adolescence, but who keeps the
innocence of his age, Salinger gives a complex image of the American post-war society
by ways of presenting it in a picaresque mode by the journey of his character Holden
Caulfield from Pennsylvania school to New York.

In the novel, the world of children is opposed to the mature “phoney” world; it is
a world of freedom and happiness that contains no falsehood. The motif of the child
emerges here in Holden’s dream, which makes him understand that is impossible to
keep children from not growing, from the cruelty of the world, and, moreover, that
escapism is not a solution, but that in order to be useful to people, to be “the catcher in
the rye”, one must live among people and integrate socially. In this respect, Golding and
Salinger express thus two distinct points of view on the concept of the child and
childhood.
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CHAPTER ONE
THE CHILD FIGURE AND CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE
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1.1 Child as a Literary Motif

The child figure as a solitary individual motif in a social world is best

described in the works of literature of the Romantic and Victorian periods. The
Romantic period was perhaps the first to put emphasis on the child figure, artistically
developing it as a deliberate symbol of innocence and purity, and depicting children as
being open to oppression and weakness as well as to the need of being protected.

The writers of the Romantic period, among whom are William Blake, William
Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, created a world which broke
the chains of religious and normative doctrines that were causing a vicious circle
bordered by strict rules, and opened the mind to nature, imagination and instinctual
elements: “Romanticism was a health-restoring revival of the instinctual life, in
contradistinction to 18th century restraints that sought to sublimate the instincts in the
united names of reason and society” (Barnard and Trilling, 1973: 4). The major concern
was the interpretation of the world through the individual experience provided with
insight and feeling which was nourished by the imagination hence “...what seems
central is a common tendency in them (at their most concentrated and intense) to insist
that the imagination or creative power is autonomous” (Barnard and Trilling, 1973: 5).
Psychological and emotional issues constructing the inner existence were the major
elements that built the artistic vision in the Romantic period. With his own feelings,
senses, his own world vision, his personal history and interiority apart from the
discipline of existing social rules and doctrines, the individual or self was the significant
figure for a work of art according to the Romantic Movement:

High Romanticism can be called the internalization of quest-romance, with the poet as
a quester, a principle of Selfhood (manifested as excessive self-consciousness) his
antagonist, and a Muse-figure his goal (frequently shadowy). The goal of the quest
from Wordsworth’s “Solitary” through Yeat’s wandering Oisin is sublimity, but this is
a sublimity not easy to distinguish from solipsism, that is, from the sense that all other
selves and the external world are unreal compared with the quester’s own exalted self-
consciousness (Barnard and Trilling, 1973:6).

Since a personal history is the sum of the processing periods of the self
identity, childhood and adolescence experiences were the major concern of the writers,
 7

especially that of Blake and Wordsworth the latter conceiving childhood as having a
significant part in the formation of a mature personality. Kenneth Muir states that:

The ecstatic childhood gives way to a sober maturity, and the close-knit rural
community is left behind for Cambridge and London; but what is lost is balanced by a
gain in understanding and human feeling, so that, when the poet’s faith in himself is
restored at the end, he has a more mature and compassionate awareness of human
demands. The loss of the childhood paradise thus becomes an individual “fortunate
fall” (1980: 127).

Under the influence of industrialization, the society sought for more power
and the children were forced to work and live under bad conditions and received harsh
treatment. In his poetry, by emphasizing the inconsistency between the inner and
external experience, Blake reacted against the condition in which children were
constrained to live. It was becoming a world of material culture. Marilyn Butler states
the social condition of the period and poet’s attitude to that condition as: “From the
start, the notion of the poet as rebel was a generous one” (1981: 3). Butler also defines
poet as “…the sensitive individual who rejected worldliness, and even, literally this
vulgar material world for a better” (1981:3). The Romantic period considered the child
as a “sublime object” which should be placed apart from the terror of adult experience,
and:

This sublimity, unlike the 18th century Sublime, is not a sublime of great conceptions,
before which the self feels small, but rather of a hoped-for potential, in which the
private self turns upon infinitude, and so is found by its own greatness (Bloom and
Trilling, 1973: 6).

Childhood was a symbol of purity, joy and innocence to the Romantics. The
child was “a symbolic representation of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Muir, 1980: 25).

On the other hand, for the mature mind, the child figure could be taken as a
symbol, or rather a motif reflecting the unconscious level that maintains the hidden
aspects of human nature, which can furthermore be explicated through the concept of
archetypes: “As an archetype of the personal unconscious, the child arises from the
depths of the human psyche and offers the potential of personal growth to every human
being” (Byrnes, 1991:1) Carl Jung’s theory on archetypes asserts that archetypes are
 8

the inherited feelings and senses which form the universal aspects of human kind and
which reside in the collective unconscious:

Modern Psychology treats the products of the unconscious fantasy activity as self
portraits of what is going on in the unconscious, or as the statements of the unconscious
psyche about itself. They fall into two categories. First, fantasies (including dreams) of
a personal character, which go back unquestionably to personal experiences, things
forgotten or repressed, and thus be completely explained by individual anamnesis.
Second, fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be
reduced to experiences in the individual’s past, and thus cannot be explained as
something individually acquired. These fantasy-images undoubtedly have their closest
analogues in mythological types. We must therefore assume that they correspond to
certain collective (and not personal) structural elements of the human psyche in general,
and, like the morphological elements of the human body, are inherited (1984: 249).

According to Jung, archetypes are always collective and we can not directly be
aware of the collective unconscious: “Contents of an archetypal character are
manifestations of process in the collective unconscious. Hence they do not refer to
anything that is or has been conscious, but to something essentially unconscious”
(1984: 249). They appear in myths and in general in oral literature and “If the archetype
itself is not conscious, its symbols (which may be called archetypal images) are brought
to consciousness in myths, dreams and so forth” (Snider, 1991: 4-5). It can manifest
itself in the meaning of symbols or myths that the human race experienced from the
beginning to the present. Speaking about the relationship, or rather, distinction between
archetype and myths, Jung himself states that: “In the individual, the archetypes appear
as involuntary manifestations of unconscious processes whose existence and meaning
can only be inferred, whereas the myth deals with traditional forms of incalculable age”
(1984: 247). This psychic inheritance can be cited as the reservoir of the experiences
that are shared by all human beings in more or less similar ways.

Byrnes states the wholness of Jung’s archetypal child by stating that:

The attributes that Jung assigns to the child-archetype highlight salient features of the
primordial symbol. The distinguishing characteristics of Jung’s archetypal child include
abandonment, wholeness, mutual transformation of the protégé and mentor, as well as
unity of time (1991: 33).

The symbol of the child as a sign of wholeness represents personal enrichment

and balance:
 9

As a symbol of wholeness, the archetypal child is a composite of opposite qualities. Not only is
the child vulnerable and invincible, but young and old. Enmeshed in the tension of opposites, the
archetypal child is able to reconcile contrary forces and grow from immaturity to maturity
(Byrnes, 1991: 36).

The child character has been a recurring motif in different texts of various
genres, from the character of folk literature up to the experienced child character of 20th
century fiction. The child character, especially that of the Romantic period, becomes a
symbol of redemption, abandonment, even wisdom and strength, and “childhood is not
just a time of life but a state of being. It is the state of being that restores us to our truest
selves and gifts us with virtues such as innocence, wonder, spontaneity, and freedom”
(Byrnes, 1991:16).

Jung addresses the child motif like a divine existence by making a reference to
past and present:

With the loss of the past, now become “insignificant”, devalued, and incapable of
revaluation, the saviour is lost too, for the saviour is the insignificant thing itself or else
arises out of it. Over and over again in the “metamorphosis of the gods” he rises up as
the prophet or first –born of a new generation and appears unexpectedly in the
unlikeliest places (sprung from a stone, tree, furrow, water, etc.) and in ambiguous form
(Tom Thumb, dwarf, child, animal, and so on).

This archetype of the “child god” is extremely widespread and intimately bound up with
all the other mythological aspects of the child motif. It is hardly necessary to allude to
the still living “Christ-child”, who, in the legend of Saint Christopher; also has the
typical feature of being “smaller than small and bigger than big” (1984: 251).

Since the motif of the child is the mediator of the opposite sides of the psyche,
it can be considered to be the manifestation of the synthesis of the conscious and the
unconscious, past and present aiming at the establishment of wholeness. This helps the
individual in the ‘individuation’ process:

The clearest and the most significant manifestation of the child motif in the therapy of
neuroses is in the maturation process of personality induced by the analysis of the
unconscious, which I have termed the process of individuation. Here we are confronted
with preconscious processes which, in the form of more or less well formed fantasies,
gradually pass over into the conscious mind, or become conscious as dreams, or , lastly
are made conscious through the method of active imagination. This material is rich in
archetypal motifs, among them frequently that of the child (Jung, 1984: 252-253).
 10

Jung also refers individuation to the individual awareness of psychic units. He

says: “I use the term ‘individuation’ to denote the process by which a person becomes a
psychological ‘in-dividual’, that is, separate, indivisible unity of ‘whole’” (quoted in
Byrnes, 1991: 37).

Literature is a fertile source, which portrays not only the open, obvious patterns
of human psyche but also the mysterious, supernatural phenomena, which are more than
reality can show. The fictional realm overwhelms the realm of reality by means of
functioning as a screen depicting the concealed feelings and psychological happenings
which human beings are not consciously aware of.

In the 19th century, a new understanding of the self developed, and it was stated
that the self was the formation of the personal history. The human’s present is the
composition of the little pieces of his past. These pieces are embodied in the shape of
the child through his development including his memory and psychological structure
that the adult resorts to in future predicament; Steedman says that:

A change took place in the way that people understood themselves – indeed, came to new
understandings of what a self was, and how a self came into being – in Western societies,
during the last century.
Particularly important for understanding this change is the part that Freudian
psychoanalysis played, between about 1900 and 1920, in summarizing and reformulating
a great many 19th century articulations of the idea that the core of an individual’s psychic
identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood (1995: 4).

The modern self in the early 20th century is considered as residing in his
interiority which is created by, among other childhood experiences: “The idea of the
child was used both to recall and to express the past that each individual life contained:
what was turned inside in the course of individual development was that which was also
latent: the child was the story waiting to be told” (Steedman, 1995: 11).

From this point of view, seeing the world from the eye of a child character as it
was revealed in the works of the Romantic period and the Victorian period, may be
helpful to grasp the feelings and personality according to human’s basic inner dynamics.
Golban states that:
 11

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge anticipate thus the concern of Victorian writers of
Bildungsroman to consider the visionary experience of children as answers to adult
methods of frustration and moral determinism. The Victorian Bildungsroman in general
presents the image of a child as an archetype rendering the wholeness of human psyche,
which is set up against the divisions of mind and feeling, excessive rationality and
emotion, morality related to rationality and instinctive action (2003: 59).

From earlier periods to the present life style, mass-society and cross-cultural
complexity, the child figure, especially in the Bildungsroman, features a characteristic
that shows his abandonment or separation from his family or country and he changes to
become an accomplished personality in society. The motif of the child becomes a
symbol that stands for a human being who, with the help of his mentality and
intelligence, becomes an integrated personality that stands for wholness, seperation,
transformation and independence.

In some books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the reader witnesses
the child’s separation from parents and home on the process of becoming an adult. In
fact, this is a natural occurrence which takes place in human life. Every individual
experiences separation from home which represents a step towards maturation, through
which the individual may become a solitary figure who is faced with the harsh
conditions of life. Childhood contains not only naivety in itself, but also fear and
anxiety: “The child, because of his immature equipment, has no way of differentiating
between inner and outer, real and imagined dangers: he has yet to learn this, he needs
the adult’s reassuring instruction” (Erikson, 1965: 398).

On the other hand, “Through an experience of solitude, the child is trying to

cultivate the adult side of his or her personality” (Byrnes, 1995: 34), and it can be
claimed that the child character may show the possibility of personal achievement in the
process of becoming an adult.

The balance in the child character is gained by wholeness; that is, the child is
the combination of innocence and experience, youth and maturity, trust and fear,
weakness and power, naivety and wisdom. They are mixed in a harmonious way and
function as complementary patterns of the character. The growth of the child must result
in the harmonious balance of the contrasting forces that lead to integrity in general.
 12

On his journey of on-going adult development, the child is also guided by an

experienced mentor the friendship of whom would nourish undeveloped aspects of his
personality. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example “the experienced
mentor represents the utilitarian faculties of sensation and thinking that Huck needs to
bring forth from his unconscious. It is precisely the fusion of complementary qualities
from the conscious and the unconscious that gives the archetypal child the characteristic
aura of wholeness”(Byrnes, 1995: 51).

The child character offers a revival of the past experience in adulthood which
may make it possible to establish the balance between the conscious and the
unconscious, past and present, image and reality, immaturity and maturity. So with the
help of the archetypal child, the character reaching maturity discovers the deepest side
of his psyche and grasps the wholeness with the help of the mixture of the child-like and
adult characteristics existing in oneself:

Through special moments of spiritual insight and revelation related to pain and suffering,
the character may eventually realize his completeness or achieve it through the
reconsilation between inward and the outward, feeling and mind, instinct and action. The
revival of the lost emotion and primary values from childhood marks the return to the
origins of life, a comprehension of the unconscious archetypal context that confers the
desired wholeness as a basis for formation (Golban, 2003: 123).

As a symbol of wholeness in literature, the child combines the unities of

childhood and adulthood in his personality, where the balance is achieved by this
integrity. Blake, for example, experiencing the dual aspects of human interiority as
innocence and experience, offers a balance by intermingling the contradictory states of
childhood and adulthood.

Depicting childhood as a happy state in which children enjoy life, Blake’s

Songs of Innocence portrays the child as being of a divine essence, while The Songs of
Experience points to a depressed mood, the reason of which is the child’s exposition to
adult severity. In his Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake intermingles the
conscious state of mind with the unconscious. The English Romantic period, having
broken the Neoclassical norms, created a surface on which the unconscious material of
 13

the human mind revealed itself. Since the direct communication with the unconscious or
with the hidden aspects of the psyche is not possible, it was the child that was to provide
this communication. Blake characterized the child falling in dreams, reaching his
unconscious and creating the image of a happy life. Golban explains this situation as:

Dream being abstract as well, inclines to a more concrete realization, in other words,
the mental fulfillment on the conscious level of the human psyche of a hidden and
obsessive wish, and later relief: ‘Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and
warm ( 2003: 53).

In this respect, the archetype of the child functions as a symbol for the
expression of the unconscious feelings and intuition.

Since the child was praised as a “sublime object”, he or she was a precious
figure viewed as merciful, sensitive, imaginative and loving:

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,

Is God, our father dear:
And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,
Is Man, his child and care.
“Divine Image” , ll: 5-8

The poetry of Blake portrays the dual aspect of childhood by pointing out how
it should be and how it is in fact. Dualism may be defined as the conscious and
unconscious level of the self, as Songs of Innocence reflect the feelings the child has,
but which are oppressed in his or her unconscious instead of living them on the
conscious level, and which are to be an expression of happiness and joy:

I happy am,
Joy is my name
“Infant Joy”, ll:5-6

On the other hand, the conscious level of the self reflects the reality of the
condition that the child lives, as in “Infant Sorrow” from The Songs of Experience:

My mother groaned! My father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt.
“Infant Sorrow”, ll: 1-2
 14

Dream is another way to reach the unconscious, since the conscious can not
control the unconscious during sleep, and, in this respect, “dream symbols are the
essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind”
(Jung, 1964: 52). Children have the ability to pass from reality to imagined states as
they are imaginative and intuitive. Imagination is another dimension in which the child
creates a better condition to live in:

And so he was quiet, and that very night,

As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack,
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
Chimney Sweeper, ll:9-16

In dreams, the unconscious of a child comes into appearance and shows the
feelings about life and the desire of living in better conditions. In the 18th century, the
children were forced to work and live under harsh conditions. In dreams, they imagine
themselves freed with the help of an angel and have fun and play, meaning that the
unconscious possesses the opposite experience of what the conscious has. In their
dreams, children get in touch with their desires lying in the unconscious about what they
want to do (playing and laughing) and how they want to live (in freedom and peace).

The Wordsworthian child also represents the journey of the self to find a better
direction in life which will bring happiness. The human being applies to his or her
unconscious to find the inner child which completes the patterns of his or her happiness.
From this point of view, the adult goes back to his childhood and youth as a
reconnection with the past. In this way, he or she accomplishes a balance for the next
step in evolution. Recollection of childhood memories gives the adult power to
overcome the predicament he has encountered. Remembering the past could be a
forceful situation that helps the individual get a better start and even fulfill the artistic
act of creation, is to be seen throughout in Wordsworth’s poetry that deals with the
 15

experience of childhood, especially in Ode: Intimations of Immortality From

Recollections of Early Childhood.

Going back to childhood helps the poet to revive his creative mind, and
complete the absent fragments of his personality. The interaction of the childhood
memories stored in the unconscious and the reasonable thinking within the disciplinary
frame leads the person to an integrated maturity. The adult completes his sentimental
poverty in his conscious mind with the help of the recollection of childhood experience.
Wordsworth, in his Prelude, goes back to his childhood which is considered as the basis
for his actual behaviour and which exerts a healing effect on his fragmented mind.

An important part of the poem consists of the memories of childhood and

youth from the unconscious and adult insights and critical thinking from the conscious,
which are united in a balance, leading the individual to accomplishment:

The earth is all before me: with a heart

Joyous, not scared at his own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wondering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again;
The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Book First, Introduction, Childhood and
Schooltime, ll: 14-18

1.2 The Representation of the Child and Childhood in Anglo-American Literature

The Neo-Classical period produced the literary works the aim of which was to
educate people with the moral lessons they included. The writers of the period valued
the classics of the Greek and Latin models and appreciated their rules. They observed
man in social connections rather than in individual psychic experiences, and insisted
that the artist be strongly connected to his society. The social man was the subject
matter of their works and he was not a solitary figure. This vision of man and the work
of art was altered by the artists of the Romantic period in the 19th century. According to
the Romantic poets, the stability created by the Neo-classical tradition should not be the
prospect of art. They appreciated the new perspectives created by the individual
imagination rather than social decorum. The Romantics put emphasis on the
 16

imaginative faculty of the individual mind and regarded man as a solitary figure in his
existence. Unlike the vision that their predecessors had, the Romantics believed that
man was not chained to the society he lived in but rather he, as a solitary figure, was
attached to nature that was the source of his spiritual experience and of his poetic
imagination. The importance of nature as poetic stimulus can strongly be felt especially
in the works of Wordsworth:

But it was Wordsworth’s view of the natural world that was the dominant influence in
changing people’s sensibilities: nature to him was a source of mental cleanliness and
spiritual understanding, it was a teacher, it was the stepping between Man and God
(Barnard, 1994: 87).

As a result of industrialization, people were under the influence of the newly

developing machine technology and they were living under the harsh conditions of
urban life. The romantic poets praised the individual feeling and the possibility of
reaching high spiritual accomplishment through the unlimited imaginative faculty that
overcomes the limited vision of the human being. Personal values and individual
consciousness are the basis for the romantic concern in poetry. Especially William
Wordsworth and William Blake’s poetry emphasized the importance of inner
sensitivity.

The experience of the childhood period was seen as the major tool for
understanding natural environment. The infantile feeling and impressions shaped the
artist’s vision. The child was a very important figure for the artist of the Romantic
period in the 19th century. The poet conceived the child as an invaluable being who
possessed strong naivety in his essence. This naivety in the child goes hand in hand with
innocence that could only belong to a pure, intact and immature mind.

Early infantile experiences were the subject matter of both Blake’s and
Wordsworth’s poetry. They believed that the infantile sensitivity and childhood
impressions had great effect on the present perception of nature and environment.
Moreover, childhood memory also affected the character formation and development,
which, especially by Wordsworth, was taken as one of the major subject matter of the
works in Romantic period.
 17

To the poets of the Romantic period, childhood insights are of crucial impact on
growing personality, as it is shown in Wordsworth’s poem ‘My heart leaps when I
behold’:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wordsworth emphasizes the spirituality of childhood which causes a heart to

leap when looking at a rainbow. The poet is now a mature man and he still has the same
sensitivity like he did in his childhood. It is the result of the powerful effect of infantile
experiences on the growing mind that is ‘the Child is the father of Man’. The child is
the mediator who keeps the mind and the heart of a mature man fresh and pure against
the corrupt industrial structure of the society. The man finds consolation through his
childhood memories which still forms his mind. Wordsworth depicts the child as a
central figure, a seed from which the mature mind starts to take its own shape, and the
recollections of childhood experience provide a consoling factor between man and his
troubled mind.

Influenced by the philosophy of John Locke, Wordsworth defines three stages in

the evolution of a human mind, which are childhood, youth and maturity. He asserts that
childhood is the beauteous spot of lifetime which includes the purity of the soul that is
equated with nature and unawareness of the intellectual and physical concerns. As to
youth, there flourishes the simple ideas and self-consciousness which reflect ‘the
growth of a poet’s mind’. The final stage is the mature mind in which all the faculties
are intermingled:

The final stage, maturity, in which ‘the mind is lord and power’, represents a synthesis of
the process leading from sensation to feeling and from feeling to thought, and then
creating a union of all these faculties in God. The simplicity of infantile responses grew to
 18

have a moral and religious dimension that is an essential part of the function of nature in
his poetry (Golban, 2004: 63).

The maturation of a mind is strongly associated with man’s interpretation of

nature. Nature is itself something holy and worshipped. It is a divine being that
nourishes the poet’s mind and that fills the poet with pleasure. As time passes, man
loses his ability to keep his connection with nature as vital as it was in his childhood.
Mature man is lost in the responsibilities of real life and its problematic situations. The
weakness of the possibility of connection with nature could only be overwhelmed by
looking back to childhood which is the reservoir of the fairest memories that reflect the
purity and innocence intermingled with nature. The recollections of childhood feeling
and sensation have a relaxing effect on the poet’s frustrated or confused mind.
Wordsworth exemplifies this situation in one of his most famous poems; Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during
a Tour:

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! How oft-
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-
How oft, in spirit, have turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains , by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams ,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
( The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. – I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
 19

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborroved from the eye. – That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.
Tintern Abbey, ll: 49-83

Subjective experiences of the child, recollected in the mature period, would

complete the psychic development of man. In this situation, the childhood is presented
as an archetypal element in human life. Carl Jung describes archetypes as our inherited
psychic behaviors or images that are common for the universe rather than for individual
condition. The child figure is one of the most well known archetypes. Jung asserts that:

Statements like, ‘The child motif is a vestigial memory of one’s own childhood,’ and
similar explanations merely beg the question. But if giving this proposition a slight twist,
we were to say, ‘The child motif is a picture of certain forgotten things in our childhood,’
we are getting closer to the truth. Since, however, the archetype is always an image
belonging to the whole human race and not merely to the individual, we might put it
better this way: ‘The child motif represents the preconscious, childhood aspect of the
collective psyche.’(1984: 254)

The Prelude, taken as Wordsworth’s major work, represents the ‘growth of a

poet’s mind’ from childhood to youth, then to maturity. The first stage of human being
is his childhood which is the storage of his happiest and joyful days. During childhood,
sensation is the dominant faculty:

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
The Prelude, Book I, ll 14-23

Childhood experience takes place amid natural objects that enable the child to
acquire perfect liberty and a perfect peace in his psyche:

From Nature and her overflowing soul,

I had received so much, that all my thoughts
 20

Were steeped in feeling; I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o'er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters
The Prelude, Book II, ll 307-409

As he grows, the mind leaves the sensation behind and simple ideas flourish in
youth which is the second stage of human life:

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!

Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things--
With life and nature--purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
The Prelude, Book I, ll 401-414

The childhood memories have a positive effect on the frustrated mind of the
poet. They put the noble, fair and hopeful situation back in the poet’s mind:

Meanwhile, my hope has been, that I might fetch

Invigorating thoughts from former years;
Might fix the wavering balance of my mind,
And haply meet reproaches too, whose power
May spur me on, in manhood now mature
To honourable toil.
The Prelude, Book I, ll. 619-624

The recollection makes it possible to regain the feeling of infant purity:

Those recollected hours that have the charm

Of visionary things, those lovely forms
And sweet sensations that throw back our life,
 21

And almost make remotest infancy

A visible scene, on which the sun is shining?
The Prelude, Book I, ll. 630-634

Like Wordsworth, William Blake also captured the special psychological insight
in childhood experience. In his poems, Blake mostly represented children who were
oppresed under the corrupt system of the society of his time. He became the voice of the
children who wanted to live in a joyful and playful world set away from the terror and
severity of the corrupt adult world. The poems in his work titled Songs of Innocence
and Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul emphasize the
significance of childhood experience during the process of the development of the
personality. The innocent condition of the child must be preserved or placed in a better,
heaven-like world the aim of which must be to protect innocence and purity.

Northrop Frye, states that:

At the centre of Blake’s thought are the two conceptions of innocence and experience,
‘the two contrary states of human soul’. Innocence is characteristic of the child,
experience of the adult. In innocence, there are two factors. One is an assumption that the
world was made for the benefit of human beings, has a human shape and a human
meaning, and is a world in which providence, protection, communication with other
beings, including animals, and in general, ‘mercy, pity, peace and love’ have a genuine
function. The other is ignorance of the fact that the world is not like this. As the child
grows up, his conscious mind accepts ‘experience’, or reality without any human shape or
meaning, and his childhood innocent vision, having nowhere else to go, is driven
underground into what we should call the subconscious, where it takes an essentially
sexual form. The original innocent vision becomes a melancholy dream of how man once
possessed a happy garden, but lost it forever, though he may regain it after he dies (1970:
237).

Blake viewed the universe of a child as a place of innocence and happiness. He

mostly emphasized the inevitable consequence of the unhappy situation of childhood
resulting from the corrupt aims of the adult world as reflected in his poem:

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.
Chimney Sweeper, ll. 1-4

As these line show,

 22

Blake is aware of the terror and hostility of the conventional adult society in the face of
some features of the child’s outlook, for the child and the young adult are impeded by
social and religious oppression, with a sickly conscience of it (Golban, 2003: 55)

The child is a blessed figure, a ‘divine image’ or a ‘mighty prophet’ to whom the
mature man, with nostalgia, returns to regain the naivety that will lead him to Heaven
and a peaceful situation: ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy.’ (Wordsworth, Ode.
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood, V)

Blake and Wordsworth saw the child and the childhood period supreme to the
rest of life. The remembered memories of the childhood period are the tools that would
heal the frustrated mind of the mature man. This idea also shaped the Bildungsroman
tradition of the Victorian period as a successor of the Romantic period in English
literature. As an archetypal image, the child figure provides completeness in the psychic
development of a personality:

Similarly Victorian writers of Bildungsroman found in their fictional representation of the

experience of the childhood as a possibility to realize their own wholeness through a
temporal reality covering childhood, youth and early maturity, and through conceiving as
a whole reason and emotion, mind and feeling, rational speculation and instinct, moral
determinism over action and instinctive action (Golban, 2003: 73).

The term Bildungsroman refers to the novel type in which the character’s both
mental and physical development from early childhood till maturity is taken as subject
matter. Some of the Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters and
George Eliot were concerned with the evolution of a character from childhood to
adulthood and the new perspectives that the character could gain as he gets a new
consciousness through his search for a better place in society. This evolution starts with
a departure from home which brings with itself ordeal, trouble and alienation that the
character has to cope with in order to reach accomplishment in society as an adult.
Harsh conditions that life serves for him make the character aware of the ‘self’ that
differentiates him from the rest of the society. This awareness of the self makes the hero
realize both rational and emotional sensations that he has. At the frustrated stages of his
character formation, the hero tries to construct a balance between these sensations along
with social sanctions such as morality.
 23

The hero looks back to his childhood experiences to judge his present activities
in a better way. The past includes good memories. Nevertheless, the appearance of evil
is also inevitable beside the dominance of the good:

The first temporal reality as present time covers the experience of childhood. Though it
becomes the past in relation to the present of hero’s stages of youth and then maturity, it
may dominate the reality of, especially, the present time of maturity through repetition,
and may become the only present that has been fully real in the hero’s experience of life
(as in David Copperfield, The History of Pendennis, or Wuthering Heights, for example).
Nevertheless, be it congenial or obstructing, the present time of the childhood may yet
offer new experiences of life as the basis for character formation, even though, when it
becomes the past, it continues to determine the process of development and change ( as,
for example, in Great Expectations or Jane Eyre) (Golban, 2003:113)

The character formation from childhood to youth and early maturity starts with a
departure from home such as in David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or in Great Expectations.
The character is left alone separated from his family members who are his or her life
mentors. On his/her way to find a place for him/her in the society, the character is
mingled with both inner and outer comprehensions that could lead him or her to
personal achievements or failures. Like the Romantic poets, Victorian writers also
focused on the character’s inner life and its spiritual components thorough his life
experiences which could model as an archetype. In this respect the child figure has a
symbolical importance for every other individual’s ordeal in order to achieve
accomplishment as completeness although there is always pain and frustration. David,
Heathcliff, Pip or Jane become the symbolical figures that represent the emotional,
vulnerable, imaginative and naïve aspects of a growing child.

The myth of childhood which has its roots in the romantic interpretation of
childhood experience is also preserved in the Victorian Bildungsroman. The child could
preserve its naivety and purity despite all the troubling factors that the adult world
prepares for him:

The paradox is that the child possesses powers and intelligence far greater than those of
the rest of the humanity; he is divine, as English romantic poets would assert, but he also
appears as insignificant, his consciousness stupid, his way of living helpless in relation to
the larger society (Golban, 2003: 131).
 24

The helpless situation of the child figure in society makes him/her gain a new
understanding of life’s components and meanings. His/her dormant consciousness can
awaken and his/her psychic wholeness could reach achievement only if he or she could
find a balance between inward and outward, past and present, good and bad, love and
hate. In this respect the child figures reveal both the archetypal images as symbols for
all humanity that reveals the psychic wholeness of man and actual childhood that
includes the limitations and frustration.

The 20th century novel, under the influence of Modernism, revealed the deepest
side of the human psyche independent of social and moral determinism. Like the
rebellious character of the Romantic period, the hero of the 20th century modern novel
reflects his discontentment and inner chaos. The development of individual
consciousness is reflected through social determinism in the Victorian novel, whereas,
in the 20th century, this development is strongly reflected through the inner world of the
character instead of through the social panorama. The frustrated mind of modern man
mostly reflects its neuroses such as in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Joyce’s work A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reflects spiritual

significance intensely. The character Stephen Daedalus is a young man who realizes
that he has the inner power to wake the artistic talent in himself. As Barnard states:

The first pages recreate with the immediacy the sensations and thought process of
infancy, with Stephen Daedalus becoming aware of his five senses, his gradual
apprehension of his immediate environment (1994: 166).

Through his mental growth, Stephen is wrapped by social, moral and religious
restrictions on his way in becoming an artist. The man in society is drawn by his inner
conflicts which indeed portrays the man in solitude

Unlike the ignorant consciousness of the protagonist of the Victorian

Bildungsroman, the consciousness of the modern character, like that of the Romantic
one, urges him to be rebellious against the restraints without considering the possibility
of the agreement between inner and outer urges.
 25

The social and moral values and the social panorama are strongly emphasized in
the Victorian novel in general as a result of Realism, the dominant literary trend in 19th
century. R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island is one of the prominent works that reflect
the idea of the Victorian time which is shaped by the increasing commercial values and
imperialism as a result. Telling about the accomplishment of the three boys Ralph, Jack
and Peterkin who created an idyllic society on an island in the Pacific despite the fact
that there have been savages on the island, the novel emphasizes the superiority of
civilization over primitive people and their so-called social structure. Having
christianized two savages, they return to England, to civilization.

Cannibalism as an opposite reflection of the moral values of the civilized white

man represents ‘otherness’. The separate identity and mind of the civilized man differs
from that of the ‘other’. Another novel that represents the idea of cannibalism and
‘otherness’ is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. In Robinson Crusoe the idea of
cannibalism is reflected as something that the civilized man would approach
indifferently unless he is disturbed or tortured by that phenomenon. As Dutheil states:
“Robinson himself admits that in killing cannibals unprovoked, he would commit a
greater crime than their own in the eyes of God” (2001: 105). In The Coral Island,
cannibalism is reflected as inhuman, barbarian or savage which has to be civilized to
reach perfect happiness.

The idea of perfection which determined the notion of the Victorian era is
emphasized by the adventures of children in The Coral Island. They created a paradise-
like society in which they could attain food and joy without any predicament: ‘Unlike
Robinson Crusoe's Puritan paradise of work and toil, Ballantyne's boys enjoy total
freedom from the practicalities and anxieties of survival’ (Dutheil, 2001: 105). The boys
perceive the natives of the Fijian society of the South Sea Island more like demons:

He was tattooed from head to foot; and his face, besides being tattooed, was besmeared
with red paint, and streaked with white. Altogether, with his yellow turban-like hair, his
Herculean black frame, his glittering eyes and white teeth, he seemed the most terrible
monster I ever beheld....A dreadful feeling of horror crept over my heart as the thought
flashed upon me that they were going to burn their enemies....Scarcely had his limbs
ceased to quiver when the monsters cut slices of flesh from his body, and, after roasting
them slightly over the fire, devoured them (Ballantyne, 1995: 198).
 26

British moral and cultural superiority over the primitive structure of the native
society is strongly emphasized in the book. Depicting just the opposite idea, William
Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954 as a parody of The Coral Island. As Dutheil
asserted:

Golding explains in "Fable" that he attacked The Coral Island, published "at the height of
Victorian smugness, ignorance, and prosperity", as a book which uncritically voices the
ideology of nineteenth-century politics, allegedly marked by an absolute faith in British
moral and cultural superiority and a belief in the progress of Western civilization.
Golding's traumatic memories of the Second World War prompted him to challenge the
assumptions underlying Ballantyne's novel, for there were things done during that period
from which I still have to avert my mind less I should be physically sick. They were not
done by the headhunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They
were done, skillfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition
of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind.

The Coral Island illustrates the transition from early Victorian optimism and relative
naiveté in the depiction of colonial relations to a more brutal, self-conscious and anxiety-
ridden discourse: with the help of Bloody Bill's tutoring, Ralph begins to perceive that the
boys' daydream of exotic adventure is about to give way to the nightmarish possibility of
"going native," which mocks the belief in British racial, moral and cultural superiority.
The boys' return to "civilization" is the only way to escape from the uncomfortable
realization that imperial adventure can no longer exist as a purely celebratory genre
(2001: 105) .

The outcome of the war could be concluded in self realization of the modern
man and his fallacious side. The war proved the possibility of the ferocity in the
civilized man and Golding presented this situation by means of the British boys: Ralph,
Jack, Piggy and Simon. The myth of childhood is strongly shaken by, though not
‘cannibal’, the bloodlust action that the boys create. The very representative idea of the
Romantic Movement that the child is pure and innocent and his phantasy merely
includes the dream of joy and game, is totally destroyed by Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
The dream for a warm bed and happy life in the Romantic period turned out to be the
dream for hunt and blood in the post war English novel. Game created the savage and
gave way to the expression of the ferocity even in the minds of boys instead of
happiness and peace and mental cleanliness. The divine image of the Romantic period is
now the image of the darkness of man’s heart. The child is no longer a figure who calms
down the frustrated mind of the mature man. Now he is more like a figure who becomes
the lord of the flies.
 27

The idea of nature that is a perfect source of peace through which the poet’s
mind grows, disturbs the minds with its evil shapes and unknown elements. It is not
holy or worshipped as it was in English Romantic poetry. Nature becomes the hotbed of
evil things. Moreover, it is the dynamic force which wakens the evil side of the human
psyche represented by the boys. Nature is inspiring as it was in English Romantic poetry
but with a different aspect: it inspires the boys to become more savage, cruel and more
despotic. That’s why their pig hunt turns into a child hunt.

The childhood memories now lose their holy vision. Then naivety can not be the
vision of the child and childhood memories that are consulted to get rid of the frustrated
situation or to get the right interpretation of the meaning of life in meaningless situation
that the mature man is compelled to experience. The myth of childhood that reflects the
harmless and primitive mind of the infant changes into the myth of universal savagery
in the form of childhood experience. The child becomes the part of a hellish figure
unlike the child in the Romantic period who leads to heaven and the child in the
Victorian period who knows how to gain accomplishment in social structure. Now it is
the end of innocence, and the darkness of man’s heart which shattered purity is strongly
emphasized as one of the major qualities of the child and childhood experience.

In American literature of the post-war period, due to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher
in the Rye, childhood receives a different literary treatment.

American participation in World War I brought with it the disappointment and

depression as a result of social breakdown, epidemic diseases and the uncertainty of the
social structure. The rapid social change shaped even the most trivial idea in people’s
mind. Industrialization and immigration became the corner stones of the cultural,
political, individual life. Besides, technological power, especially the development of
the automobile technology by Henry Ford, had great effect on country life and city
culture. Mobility accelerated the ordinary lives of conventional people. Commercial
issues took the first place and this movement caused people to adhere more closely to
the mass culture and commercial power and be less dependent on traditional life styles.
So this transformation from conventional values to more developed and complex city
 28

life led people to search for personal values and rights which would keep them stand up
right in this chaotic environment.

The developments in different fields of modern science, such as physics,

psychology and medicine, opened the minds to different visions. Scientific thinking
offered people the possibility of diversity of the choices that are created by life and
nature. In this respect, people started to struggle for the fee will and free choice in this
mass cultural society.

Conservative writers such as Allen Tate, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot valued the real
life according to the traditional and moral explanations:

Such southern writers as John Crowe Ransom, John Peale Bishop, and Allen Tate, as well
as poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, reacted
spiritedly to the increasingly prevalent assumption that non-scientific thinking, because it
was imprecise and value-laden, could not explain anything. They belittled the capacity of
science to provide accounts of the things that matter, like subjective experience and moral
issues. Art to them, became the repository of a way of experiencing the world other than
that offered by science, an alternative world view (Baym et al., 1979: 1671).

The literature of the period between the two world wars reflected the dual aspect
of the social structure, which represented non-conformity with the previous social and
moral ideas. The loss of social stability and the emergence of social breakdown shaped
the literature of the age and its contents. The universal truths on humanities and social
values were no longer valid for the people of the World War I period. People lost their
faith in the stability of security, social welfare and remaining structure of political or
religious issues. Modernism as a major movement of the 20th century reflected the
fragmented vision of the modern man who was in search of the meaning of life, for it
was already destroyed by the ineluctable developments of the era. The shift from social
aspects of the society to personal experience alters the perspective of the literary works.
Symbols and images need to be interpreted in order to understand the hidden meaning
of the literary work. The sequence of the explanations in a traditional work leaves its
place to the arbitrary expressions of the writer. Subjectivity is one of the major
characteristics of modernist writing. The writer reflects his or her own individual life
 29

experiences regardless of the connections, time and place sequence among the patterns
by informing the reader with a limited point of view:

Victorian fiction featured an authoritative narrator; modern fiction tended to be written in

the first person or to limit the reader to one character’s point of view on the action. This
limitation accorded with the modernist sense that “truth” does not exist objectively, but is
the product of a personal interaction with reality. The selected point of view was often
that of a naïve or marginal person – a child or an outsider – so as to convey better the
reality of the confusion rather than the myth of certainty (Baym et al., 1979: 1675).

Similar to the 19th century, modern writers of the 20th century also scrutinized
the society in which they lived. Modern writers judged the possibility of the existence of
a bridge between the individual identity and the society. They examined the alienated
man and his problems within the society in which the moral values and the meaning of
life lost their values as a result of world war.

Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner

presented social and moral dilemmas depicting the good and bad aspects of the society.
As the novelists of the Lost Generation, they reflected a rebellion against the sense of
nothingness, searching for an identity in that corrupt world. William Barrett points to
this situation in his essay “American Fiction and American Values”:

The American, so far as he is conscious, is engaged everywhere in asking himself who he

is; and one sign of our extraordinary self-consciousness as a nation is that we have
produced so many books of literary introspection like this one during the past few years
(Barret, 1969: 60).

He goes on writing about the sense of nihilism reflected in fiction by referring to

John Aldridge’s ideas on this matter:

Aldridge’s thesis is that the fiction of the present literary generation suffers from an
essential nihilism: since the writer no longer shares with his readers the assumption of a
stable set of values, he has come, out of this state of spiritual deprivation, to portray the
life around him as futile and meaningless (Barret, 1969: 60).

The problematic situations of the individual consciousness and the shift from
moral values to personal freedom remained the same after World War II, and as Irving
Howe states “the task of the novelist was now to explore a chaotic multiplicity of
meanings rather than to continue representing the surfaces of common experience”
 30

(1969: 127). The depression years of the war period altered the life conditions of people.
Even though technological changes in the lives of people seemed to be good, they,
indeed, put man in a powerless condition lacking moral spirituality. Howe also states:

By the mass society we mean a relatively comfortable, half welfare and half garrison
society in which the population grows passive, indifferent, and atomized; in which
traditional loyalties, ties, and associations become lax or dissolve entirely; in which
coherent publics based on definite interests and opinions gradually fall apart; and in
which man becomes a consumer, himself mass-produced like the products, diversions,
and values that he absorbs ( 1969: 130).

The major values such as family relationships or traditional ceremonies that

reflect the important moments in human life lose their importance and they become
passive issues in the individual’s life experience. Now it is not the ‘traditional centers of
authority’ that lead the individual life, but it is the ‘burden of freedom’ that puts man on
a path which has no ideal direction. Thus the fiction of the period mainly reflects the
adult mind in this corrupt world and its handicaps that compel the human being to be in
despair of a better life.

William Barrett, in his article “American Fiction and American Values”, states
that by “adjusting to life without their spiritual struggles”, people become the figures
lacking the meaning of traditional background that emphasizes social and individual
conformity: “We have the crack up and the breakdown, neurosis and maladjustment, but
we do not have the tragic sense of life” (1969: 65).

In this respect the fiction in America during the post-war period created
characters that are rebellious to the ugly, inescapable futile life condition that causes
breakdowns in individual life. J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye, created the
protagonist, Holden Caulfield, as a fighter against the corruption in mass society which
is based upon adult experience. Holden tries to make the children have little contact
with the immoral and unscrupulous situations of mature life, and he wants to save the
children from growing up with the aim of protecting their innocence. The voice of a
child could reflect the rebellious psyche of the individual perfectly since it was the
symbol of naivety which can not resist even the least unfair situation. In this respect,
Holden’s naivety struggles against the unfair, immoral, profiteering, dirty affairs of the
 31

adult world. Nevertheless, his realization that there is nothing he can do no matter how
hard he tries, prepares his own breakdown: “The bathos of American society turns out
to be the real illness from which Holden suffers” (Rowe, 1991: 77 – 95).

In his article “Dirty Words”, Benjamin DeMott makes a generalization about the
themes and characters of the novels of J.D. Salinger. He says: “his stories insist that the
least tolerable of these agonies is the endless, meaningless, hopelessly barren
yammering of the figures who conceive themselves to be the practical managers of this
world” (1969: 219)

Like the characters of the novels of the English writers of the Victorian period,
Holden may seem to represent similar characteristics with those of the ‘orphan child’ of
the Victorian novels. Like David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, Holden has to cope with the
handicaps that life serves him without any mentor who will show him the right way to
follow. Although Holden’s parents are alive and he has contact with his teachers who
tell him about life and its hidden aspects, he does not believe them sincerely since they
are representatives of the adult world, this situation is explained by Joyce Rowe as
follows:

However bad the adult world seems, enough sources of social strength remain to make the
protagonist's struggle toward maturity worthwhile. But Holden never finds such an adult
(1991: 77).

Similarly, both Holden and the orphan child of Victorian fiction reveal naivety
and simplicity when they face the ugly labyrinths of life. Nevertheless, there is a major
difference between Holden and the Victorian character: the child of the Victorian fiction
struggles for the ‘individuation’ and accomplishment in society, and he knows that he
has to play the life game according to its rules. As to Holden, he, too, struggles in
society, but with a different vision: all he tries to accomplish is to reshape the society by
extracting its faulty items. In this respect, Holden is much more like the rebellious
character of English Romantic poetry. Holden rebels against the corrupt figures and
institutions of society in order to replace moral purity. He feels alone and sees
 32

everybody as phony. Like the child of English Romantic poetry, he represents purity
and naivety. He wants to save children and:

The world he wants is a world of children or children-surrogates like the nuns. He would
people it with little girls whose skates need tightening, little girls like his adored sister
Phoebe; with little boys like the ones at the Museum of Natural History, filled with
exquisite terror at the prospect of seeing the mummies. It would include small boys with
poems on their baseball gloves like his brother Allie who died some years ago from
leukemia and so has been arrested in permanent youth by death. The chief citizens of
Holden's world would be the little boys who walk along the curbstone and sing (Seng,
1961: 205).

Resembling the figures of English Romantic poetry, Holden thinks that the
world of children must be joyful and playful, not involving any immoral ideas on tricks
and sexual affairs which belong to adult corruption. Holden reflects the infantile
sensitivity seeking for a better place to continue not only his own innocence but also the
innocence of the other children. Nevertheless, he can not find any other place that is
suitable for a naïve life apart from adult experience: “Huck Finn had the Mississippi and
at the end of the Mississippi he had the wild west beyond Arkansas.... But for Holden,
there is no place to go....” (Heiserman, Miller, 1956: 129–37). Yet Holden wants to
make a “flight out of the world, out of the ordinary, and into an Eden of innocence or
childhood” (Heiserman, Miller, 1956: 134).

Holden is an innocent figure whose mind does not comprehend the complex and
immoral behaviour of the phony members of the adult world. Holden’s dream of
catching the children who are about to fall from the cliff of the adult world proves his
struggle for innocence and naivety that would make the world a better place to live
without any taint that the adult mind is doomed to have. Innocence and purity are the
victims of that corrupt society. Like a Romantic hero, Holden escapes from that
immoral world by means of mental images in which he dreams saving pure, joyful
children from corruption of adult experiences. In his dreams, like a Romantic hero
staying away from materialism of corrupt, phoney adult world, Holden is happy and
hopeful for future fulfillment.
 33

CHAPTER TWO
THE DUAL REPRESENTATION OF CHILDHOOD IN GOLDING AND
SALINGER
 34

2.1 William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the End of Innocence

World War II caused many changes in societies. The social panorama of the
period was so fragmented that the complexity led people to chaos and despair. Ruined
buildings, poor quality food, limited social services, uncertainty about the future,
despair and frustration shaped the view of the people in the world.

In addition to this, industrialization forced people to take steps according to this

progress. They had to become more civilized. Nevertheless the civilized societies found
themselves in a search for the meaning of life. They sought the meaning of their
existence in that fragmented world. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is one of the
major works reflecting both the chaotic situation of the mind of that period and the
mysterious side of the human subconscious. Taking the life situations of the school boys
marooned on an island as a subject matter, Golding aims at showing the presence of the
evil in the human soul:

Morally wounded by the extreme barbarity and sadism that the Second World War
disclosed in the heart of supposedly civilized Man, Golding chose to project his spiritual
uneasiness into a picture of children's hatred and deadly combats (Talon, 1968: 296).

War changed the ideas on human nature and many critics believed that the evil
aspect of war was the result of the defects of the human mind and soul which are hard to
see with the naked eye but with the eyes of the moral values:

The war confirmed that `the darkness was all around, inexplicable, unexorcised, haunted,
a gulf across which the ladder (science) lay without reaching to the light (Reilly,1988:
141).

Discovering that there are no adults with them, the boys create their own society
and culture. They understand that the power of freedom is in their hands. There are
neither restrictions of parents nor sanctions by social and moral values. They have to
create their own rules and their own social order. The uninhabited island serves them as
a source for the reflection of the hidden aspects of their ‘humanity’. Nature with its
 35

wildness challenges them and the children have to do something to survive on that
island.

Ralph and Piggy are the first that are introduced to the reader. From the very
beginning, one can conceive that they are just children with childlike desires and
features. The childish pride of Piggy could be observed when he talks about his glasses
or Ralph can be said to be in a childlike thoughtlessness when he mocks Piggy’s name
or when he suggests in a simple way that they would be rescued by his father.

Even though they are a group of schoolboys, they understand that they should
organize a system just like that of a real society. On finding a conch shell, Ralph and
Piggy use it to call and meet the other boys. It works and the rest of the boys among
whom are Jack, Simon, Roger and the twins and a group of choir boys gather around
Ralph and Simon. The importance of the conch is great since it is the only tool which
assembles and equals everybody and gives the right to speak in ‘society’. Whoever has
the conch, he has the right to speak. The first steps are taken to create a society by
finding the representative of the order as a conch and choosing Ralph as a chief. Voting
for a chief resembles the organization of the civilized man. No matter how primitive the
place they are in is, the children are still a part of the civilization which they have come
from.

Jack proves his superiority with the uniform and his apparent authority on the
choir. From the very beginning Ralph understands that Jack’s voice was “the voice of
one who knew his own mind” (Lord of the Flies: 20). He will realize soon that it was
the voice of a totalitarian mind that does whatever he wants without respecting the
needs of other voices, and that was the voice reflecting the lust for blood and violence.
He is the leader of the choir walking in two parallel lines behind him. Their eccentric
clothes were all in black: “Their bodies from throat to ankle were hidden by black
cloaks…” (Lord of the Flies: 18), and they brought the darkness with them. Jack, being
the chief of the choir, had all the weird and distinctive features with his red hair, blue
frustrated eyes ready to turn to anger and his apparent authority without any silliness on
that creature-like party of boys.
 36

Ralph, the fair haired boy, gets the leadership with his charisma. He is a smart
boy. Though he seems strong, “…there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that
proclaimed no devil” (Lord of the Flies: 7). He is the representative of the democratic
authority which is for the benefit of their primitive society. Claire Rosenfield makes a
comparison between Ralph and Jack, stating that:

If Ralph is a projection of man's good impulses from which we derive the authority
figures whether god, king, or father who establish the necessity for our valid ethical
and social action, then Jack becomes an externalization of the evil instinctual forces of the
unconscious (1961: 93-94).

The character Piggy is not given the chance to be a leader. Because of his
asthma, he seems weak for such a burden. He lacks the charisma but in fact he is the one
who knows what to do. He is a man of wisdom and a perfect incarnation of fidelity to
order and justice. Piggy lacks the power to blow the conch as a result of his asthma but
he is aware of its power and warns Ralph that the conch must be in the hands of a
sensible leader like him. He is the one who suggests organizing a meeting and taking
the names of the boys to a list. Piggy, stands for reason and scientific knowledge. His
glasses reflect the passion for the scientific mind. Being an outsider of that society, he
observes the situation in a good manner and like an adult he criticizes the unfair
situations with full reason. Piggy’s glasses mist when he is humiliated or is insulted by
the others. He is a lonely figure who desperately needs to be loved and recognized by
the society.

Through the novel the reader witnesses the ‘dehumanization’ of the little
children. Harsh conditions served by nature accelerate their process of becoming little
monsters of the island, who seek blood and anarchy:

Denied the sustaining and repressing authority of parents, church, and state, they form a
new culture the development of which reflects that of the genuine primitive society,
evolving its gods and demons (its myths), its rituals and taboos (its social norms)
(Rosenfield, 1961: 93).
 37

Freud also believes that “men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love,
who simply defend themselves if they are attacked; but that a powerful measure of
desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment” (Freud,
1994: 40)

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies can be taken as an example of the struggle
between reason and instinct. The mysterious part of the human being forces the soul to
transgress the boundaries of reason. It may deny the existence of the exterior forces
such as moral forms established by the society, and puts the instincts in the service of
the ‘egoistical’ part of the soul. This may lead the individual to self- destructive or
harmful attitudes, which results in unethical irrational outcome:

This aggressive cruelty usually lies in wait for some provocation, or else it steps into the
service of some other purpose, the aim of which might as well have been achieved by
milder measures. In circumstances that favor it, when those forces in the mind which
ordinarily inhibit it cease to operate, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals
men as savage beasts to whom the thought of sparing their own kind is alien (Freud,
1994:40).

Our inherited, primal, instinctual passions and desires rest in the id: “Id is the
part of the psyche characterized by undifferentiated instinctual life” (Pearson, 1991: 33).
Moreover, “the ego wants to get its need met, too, but also cares how they are met. It
mediates between the Id and the outer world, providing some rational restraint to focus
and harness the id’s desires” (Pearson, 1991:33). In the Lord of the Flies, Jack seems to
be in the service of his id, ignoring the ethical constraints that should exist for the sake
of the society. His ego does not care how its need is met. At first, Jack hesitates to kill
the pig. Even though he draws his knife with a flourish, his arm pauses with
astonishment and terror. It seems that his ego restraints him, and prevents him from
killing the pig at once: “They knew very well why he hadn’t: because of the enormity of
the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood”
(Lord of the Flies: 33). Nevertheless, Jack’s instinctual desire for killing will not stop
his aim: “Next time there would be no mercy” (Lord of the Flies: 33).

On the uninhabited island, all children’s actions seem to be reflected in a mild

way under the mode of playing. Play is the major tool that frees them from the reality of
 38

life and the forces of the adult world. It gives the opportunity for the child to develop
physically and spiritually. “Play, then, is a function of the ego, an attempt to
synchronize the bodily and the social processes with the self” (Erikson, 1965: 204). In
this respect, play has an important part in the child’s growth since it is the major tool by
which the child proves his or her ego and takes the important steps about processing his
ability of decision making. During play he or she encounters different situations and
creates a reaction against these situations by portraying his own individual dimensions,
so “the child’s play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by
creating model situations as to master reality by experiment and planning” (Erikson,
1965: 214). Play creates its own world and “to hallucinate ego mastery and yet also to
practice it in an immediate reality between phantasy and actuality is the purpose of
play” (Erikson; 1965: 204). The ego tries to find his role. Freed from the limitations of
his social reality, the child reflects his mastery over the situations that occur in this play
world: “The dramatization takes place in the play sphere. Utilizing mastery over objects,
the child can arrange them in such a way that they permit him to imagine that he is
master of his life predicament as well” (Erikson, 1965: 209, 210).

Being aware of his or her physical potential and ability to control his bodily
movements along with his individual mastery over the experience, the child gains his or
her self-esteem and creates his own self through social reality which, later, becomes a
real accomplishment. So the child feels better.

The individual tries to create his or her own unique self through his
individuation in the complexity of the civilization he lives in. This complexity may help
the individual adapt himself to the continuous changes in the society, yet the complexity
of the concepts, ideas and images may lead the individual to have difficulty in
adaptation. This also happens in the children’s world, where frustrated or troubled
children reflect their reaction with a damaging activity:

No wonder, then, that some of our troubled children break out of their play into some
damaging activity in which they seem to us to ‘interfere’ with our world; while analysis
reveals that they only wish to demonstrate their right to find an identity in it (Erikson,
1965: 230).
 39

In the Lord of the Flies, the play world of the children soon becomes their real
life and turns into a hell rather than creating a helpful situation as a model to solve their
problems. They have to find some solutions in order to cope with the problematic
situations, such as finding food, making a safe place to sleep, and protecting themselves
from the dangers of the forest. Creating an artificial play world, they start to organize all
their staff like primitive man without any help of the devices of civilization. E. M.
Forster says in his introduction to the novel: “Here the innocent (the boy as it were) are
Neanderthal Man, and the corrupters are Homo Sapiens, our own ancestors, who eat
other animals, discover intoxicants, and destroy” (Lord of the Flies: xii). Concerning the
involvement of the play:

The games of the beginning have a double function: they, first of all, reflect the child's
attitude toward play as a temporary cessation from the activities imposed by the adult
world; but like the games played before the formation of civilization, they anticipate the
ritual which reveals a developing society. So the children move from voluntary play to
ritual, from only pretending to reality, from work like representation to identification.
The older strictures imposed by parents are soon forgotten but every now and then a
momentary remembrance of past prohibitions causes restraint (Rosenfield, 1961: 95).

As children make a work plan they understand that they have to put down sound
rules to make the things work all right without permitting any complications to occur.
Jack passionately seems to be the most prominent supporter of the rules: “ ‘We’ll have
rules’ he cried excitedly. ‘Lots of rules! Then when anyone breaks ’em-’ ” (Lord of the
Flies: 36). Nevertheless, his passion is not for the sake of the rules that put an order to
their society but for the sake of his personal desire for hunting and killing.

Piggy is aware of the impossibility of communication with the adult world. His
bitter realism and his unconditional obedience to the rules and authority make him a
boring figure. Irony arises here, because Piggy has the glasses due to his visual
disability, but he is the one who really sees the actual predicament. On the other hand,
Ralph does not have the courage to face the reality and by his words he creates a world
of fun in which they will certainly be rescued by his father or by someone from the
adult world. Ralph says to the boys what they want to hear: it is a good, confident island
and they will have fun and they will be rescued. Like the characters in Waiting for
 40

Godot by Samuel Beckett, he waits to be rescued, but the difference is that he offers a
solution: making a fire and keeping it alive in order to be seen by the ships passing by.
To light the fire, all the children run and they are scattered into the forest without any
sensible organization showing the next step, where Piggy thinks that they are “Acting
like a crowd of kids” (Lord of the Flies: 42). He is the voice of wisdom and reason:
“How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put the first things first and act proper?”
(Lord of the Flies: 50). In this respect it seems that: “The adult the boys so desperately
need is among them but disguised so impenetrably that there is no hope of his being
recognized, let alone heeded” (Reilly, 1988: 142-145).

Passion for lighting a fire leads them to excessive feelings. They take Piggy’s
glasses by Jack’s despotic order and make a fire whose flames become higher and
higher as a part of the wild life: “Beneath the capering boys a quarter of a mile square of
forest was savage with smoke and flame” (Lord of the Flies: 49). Allegorically, this fire
can also be taken as the reflection of the fire of the passion for the uncontrolled savage
inside them: “Startled, Ralph realized that the boys were falling still and silent, feeling
the beginnings of awe at the power set free below them. The knowledge and the awe
made him savage” (Lord of the Flies: 49).

All that Jack wants is to hunt and get meat for the community. Even the silence
and the mystery of the uncommunicative forest forces his passion for hunting rather
than dissuading him from such an idea. Jack is obsessed with the idea of hunting
because of his instinctual desires. He does what he wants by ignoring the other
important issues such as making shelters or keeping the fire alive for the sake of their
society. He chooses what is easy because getting civilized is the hardest thing. His
hunters are the part of an easy game: dancing and swimming all day. Ralph is aware of
the situation:

Meetings. Don’t we love meetings? Every day. twice a day we talk… I bet if I blew the
conch this minute, they’d come running. Then we’d be, you know, very solemn, and
someone would say we ought to build a jet, or submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting
was over they’d work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting” (Lord of the Flies:
56).
 41

The children are not able to understand that they are the sorry victims of that
civilization which caused them to return into primitive men. The more civilized they try
to become the more savage actions they perform and the more primitive they become.
The instinctual fear from the unknown occurs inside the children and they wonder
whether there is any beast or devil in the forest. Children are afraid of the untold terrors
of the forest and of the “beastie or snake-thing”. Simon is the first to question the
existence of it. He is the philosopher of the society since he really understands the real
meaning of the ‘beastie’ that they are afraid of.

When Roger plays with Henry in the forest, he unconsciously obeys the rules
that are set by society. He throws some stones at Henry but he is not able to dare to
throw them exactly on him:

Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the
protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned
by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins (Lord of the Flies: 70).

This secret side of the human soul could be harmful. Since they are not under
the control of consciousness, people mostly fear the existence of these patterns, because
the mystic sides of life and human soul have always been something frightening, which
may destabilize the psyche. For this reason, people mostly tend to repress or repudiate
these patterns lest they may be hurt by them. The modern man of the 20th century is the
man who wants to take conscious control of life that is rational. That is why rules and
norms are created by human beings. In the case of Lord of the Flies, the unconscious
side of the psyche of these boys comes to the surface gradually. The mentality which
forces these boys on the island to obey the rules will undergo changes as they really
establish their own ethic and their own taboos reflecting their inner world. They start to
paint their faces as a part of their game. Jack says: “Like in the war. You know- dazzle
paint. Like things trying to look like something else” (Lord of the Flies: 71). He,
blackening his face, reflects his inner desire for a primitive soul. The paint makes him
someone savage rather than civilized. He looks like some awesome stranger that is
thirsty for blood. It is the paint that frees him from the restraints of the rules and masks
his shame and self-consciousness It gives power to kill without mercy, without shame,
without hesitation. Behind the mask, the child is courageous to turn his face to the
 42

inside of his soul instead of looking at vivid realities. He sees what lies beneath his soul
and does what it wants to do.

Jack and his hunters kill a pig in the forest with great passion and desire. The
expectation of blood lights their eyes with blaze. Jack and his hunters were satisfied
with the lashings of the blood. They sing with astonishment: ‘Kill the pig. Cut her
throat. Bash her in.’ With a different aim, Ralph is seeking for the chances of rescue.
Seeing that the fire on the mountain is over, Ralph gets angry because they have missed
a ship passing by. Here, the reader witnesses the clash of ideas between Jack and Ralph.
In other words, it is the clash between passion and commonsense. Besides, it is this
passion with tyranny which breaks one of the lenses of Piggy’s glasses. This situation
shows that “The dominance of reason is over; the voice of the old world is stilled. The
primary images are no longer those of fire and light, but those of darkness and blood”
(Rosenfield, 1988: 95-98)

Jack provides the island community with meat which is more useful than fire,
but what is important is to get rescued from the island. Nevertheless, Ralph and Piggy
can not resist the idea of eating meat since their diet is based on fruit and nuts. Although
they are determined not to be a part of Jack’s society, by eating meat they show the
acceptance of Jack’s victory:

The provision of meat becomes a key element in the establishment of his new society.
The democrats can stay and get diarrhoea with Ralph or defect to Jack and a full table, at
the trifling cost of their freedom. The meat-giver wins hands down; a hungry democracy
cannot compete with a well-fed tyranny (Reilly, 1988: 158).

Actually, the childish wish is not exactly meat, but blood and terror. This
passion was so effective that even when they imitate the hunt with their dance and song
and their imitation of the role of the pig in their circle, they really feel its frenzy but do
not lose their self control. During this performance, they know that it is just play. Yet,
gradually, their play becomes more and more cruel and uncontrolled every time and
finally, their play becomes real.
 43

Ralph, considering all the facts, decides to hold a meeting that is not for fun but
for business. Thinking by himself, he questions the existence of man: “If faces were
different when lit above or below – what was a face? What was anything?” (Lord of the
Flies: 89). He seems to be considering the possibility of the coexistence of the good and
the evil in one seed. Viewed from different aspects, human beings could reflect the
opposite elements together. A face can hinder too many aspects of the soul. The stable
appearances may not give the exact point about the fact what is what. Ralph, as a chief,
has to make wise decisions and put the things that are going wrong into the right order.
Their civilization starts to break into pieces. Most importantly, the fear inside them
takes control over it. Most of them believe in the existence of the beastie or the snake-
thing. Jack, showing no traces of fear, says: “The thing is –fear can’t hurt you any more
than a dream” (Lord of the Flies: 95). Dreams include the materials of the subconscious,
and they occur on the conscious level in dreams or in any circumstance that prepares the
right situation for their reflection. If the fear rises from the inside of the man, its cure
also must come from there, as Piggy is aware of:

You have doctors for everything; even the inside of your mind. You don’t really mean
that we got to be frightened all the time of nothing? Life is scientific, and that’s what it is.
In a year or two when the war is over they’ll be traveling to Mars and back. I know there
isn’t no beast-not with claws and all that, I mean-but I know there isn’t no fear, either
(Lord of the Flies: 97).

Piggy is in a hopeful mood about their future. He believes in the power of

science and reason rather than superstition. He believes in the gradual process of
science. Piggy’s point of view can be described as ‘scientific humanism’ which prevents
one from seeing the essence of the matter:

The ascendancy of scientific humanism, its inability to see or to posit eternal verities,
leaves modern man free falling in the abyss of nihilism. We confront, through our
excavation of Golding's myth, the value problem. Until Simon and Piggy together
comprise an Osiris, Western civilization cannot diagnose, let alone cure, its essential
illness (Fitzgerald, Kayser, 1992: 56).

The chain of reason in their mind seems to be lost and Ralph is aware of this. He
understands that sanity begins to break up, because everybody, including himself starts
to believe in the existence of the beast. Only Simon has the courage to suggesting that
“Maybe it’s only us” (Lord of the Flies: 103). He is aware of “mankind’s essential
 44

illness”. Now, the fact that what’s what is the necessity of the rules and the proper
assemblies to be rescued return to what’s what is whether there are ghosts or not. Their
lawful world is breaking and Ralph knows that even if he blows the conch they will not
come to the assembly. Jack is becoming dominant in their micro society and, with the
power of his totalitarian mind, he scares everybody. His passion for hunting seems to be
the threatening factor over the order of their society. It is this passion that ignores the
importance of the conch, breaks Piggy’s glasses, causes the fire to die and breaks the
rules.

All they need is the ‘majesty of the adult world’ and they get a sign from there:
“a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs”
(Lord of the Flies: 111). The parachute man comes from the adult world that created a
civilization that kills men in war. Seeing the corpse among the trees, “littluns” assumes
it to be the beast, makes the rest of the society believe in the existence of it. In fact, the
beast or the evil reflects the unconscious part of their psyche. This part is the reservoir
of the repressed feelings and desires, and they may become on the conscious level
dependent on the experience. This hidden side of the psyche influences the individual’s
interpretation of the world and environment. In this respect, the fear for a beast reflects
their capacity for the creation of evil. This is in their psyche and it influences their
interpretation of the environment. The parachute man is not a beast but they assume it
to be a beast, which reflects what lies beneath their psyche.

The defect in their psyche comes to surface under the right circumstances. This
is most evidently seen at the play of hunting. Missing a pig to hunt in the forest, Jack
and his followers pretend to be hunting in order to satisfy their desire for hunt. Taking
Robert into a circle, they jab him with the butt end of their spears as if he is the real pig.
Even Ralph joins them:

“They got his arms and legs.” Ralph carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed
Eric’s spear and jabbed at Robert with it.

‘Kill him! Kill him!’

All at once Robert was screaming and struggling with the strength of frenzy. Jack had
him by the hair and was brandishing his knife. Behind him was Roger, fighting to get
close. The chant rose ritually, as at the last moment of a dance or a hunt.
 45

‘
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!’

Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown vulnerable flesh. The
desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering.

Jack’s arm came down; the heaving circle cheered and made pig dying noises. Then they
lay quite, panting, listening to Robert’s frightened snivels. He wiped his face with a dirty
arm, and made an effort to retrieve his status.

‘Oh, my bum!’

He rubbed his rump ruefully. Jack rolled over.

‘That was a good game.’

‘Just a game,’ said Ralph uneasily. ‘I got jolly badly hurt at rugger once’ ” (Lord of the
Flies: 136).

What they want is a real act of killing. The play is a tool that helps them to fulfill
their desire. By means of play, the instinctual forces had come to the surface and
become externalized. The passion revives in the play.

As to the real hunt in the forest, the passion is at its peak. Seeing the parachute
man like a great ape sitting asleep with his head between its knees, they conclude that it
is the best thing to hunt a pig and leave some of the kill for it. They are frenzied and
frantic enough to go too far as to stick their spears right to the bottom of the pig even if
it is already killed by its throat. They leave the head of the pig as a sacrifice to the beast
in order not to be bothered by it. It resembles a ritual that existed in the primitive
societies, defined as a need for communication:

Now every kill becomes a sexual act, is a metaphor for childhood sexuality.... Every
subsequent need for ritual fulfills not only the desire for communication and a substitute
security to replace that of civilization, but also the need to liberate both the repressions of
the past and those imposed by Ralph. Indeed, the projection of those impulses that they
cannot accept in themselves into a beast is the beginning of a new mythology (Rosenfield,
1961: 97).

Carol S. Pearson, by examining the archetypes that exist in the human soul,
makes a list of these archetypes as Innocent, Orphan, Warrior, Caregiver, Seeker,
Destroyer, Lover, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Sage and Fool. The Destroyer could be
matched with Jack and his hunters. Pearson depicts the Destroyer’s response to the
problem as to be destroyed by it or to destroy it, the entrophy being in us: “The
 46

tendency to increasing disorder and chaos is the natural order of the universe” (Pearson,
1991: 137). In addition to this:

The Destroyer turns us into villains when we refuse to acknowledge and take
responsibility for the harm we do-and we all do harm of some kind. At worst, some
people who have failed to develop the ego strength to control their impulses or a sense of
morality or character become totally dominated by the Destroyer and have no power or
wish to stop their destructive behavior (Pearson,1991: 145).

Gradually, Jack seems to lose control of himself and to be unable to stop the
destructive behavior. He makes the game something real and leaving the head on a stick
as a sacrifice resembling a totem, these primitive men who create their laws in the form
of ritual and taboo, the oldest form of prohibition.

The taboo or prohibition against eating particular parts of the totem animal coincides with
the children's failure to eat the head of the pig. It is that portion which is set aside for the
beast. Just as Freud describes the primitive feast, so the children's festive meal is
accompanied by a frenzied ritual in which they temporarily release their forbidden
impulses and represent the kill. To consume the pig and to reenact the event is not only to
assert a common identity but also to share a common responsibility for the deed.
None of the boys is excluded from the feast (Rosenfield, 1961: 97-98).

Jack decides that ‘the beast is a hunter.’ The irony can be observed here: the real
beast is inside the human being and it is this beast that causes them to become real
hunters. The beast inside makes them become a part of the system that works for the
sake of the wish for blood and hunting. Only Simon could understand the inferior
aspects of the soul and realize that, actually, the beast is inside us. With lots of flies
around the decaying head, the head of the pig, the beast, the Lord of the Flies speaks to
Simon:

‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’
Simon shook.
‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’
Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.
‘Pig’s head on a stick.’
‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a
moment or two the forest and all other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody
of the laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the
reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?’ (Lord of the Flies: 171,172).

After seeing that the beast was the parachute man, Simon realizes that “The
beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as
 47

possible” (Lord of the Flies: 175). Meanwhile, Jack and his hunters, wearing war paint,
are playing like members of a tribe. They begin to dance and chant: “Kill the beast! Cut
his throat! Spill his blood!” Gradually they lose their control: “The movement became
regular while the chant lost its first superficial excitement and began to beat like a
steady pulse” (Lord of the Flies: 181). The chant became the major item that unites
them. It rose and rose: “Now out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind”
(Lord of the Flies: 182). The circle took Simon in the center while he was screaming
about the dead man on the hill. They assumed Simon was the beast and killed him
during their ritual:

The later ritual, in which Simon, as a human substitute identified with the totem, is killed,
is in this novel less an unconscious attempt to share the responsibility for the killing of a
primal father in prehistoric times, than it is a social act in which the participants celebrate
their new society by commemorating their severance from the authority of the civilized
state (Rosenfield, 1961: 97-99).

Ralph and Piggy are involved in this ritual, but they deny being the contributors
to the crime. This denial can be also taken as a part of the beast in the human being, as
they do not want to take the responsibility for the savage action.

After Simon’s death, the system breaks up. Piggy’s glasses, the symbol of
reason, are taken from him by force and are left with the conch alone, which is now
something useless. Piggy and Ralph were left with nothing but troubling ideas that
cause them to think critically about having rules or hunting and killing. Now the beast is
turned to them and it was Piggy’s destiny to be the victim of this savage. The beast
caused two children to die: Simon and Piggy, the two wisest companions. Ralph, being
aware of the situation, reasons: “They were savages it was true; but they were
human…” (Lord of the Flies: 222).That the innocence of the childhood is totally lost is
shown by the fact that the next victim of the savage world is Ralph. Roger sharpens a
stick at both ends to ‘hunt’ Ralph. Like the head of the pig on the stick, Ralph’s head
will be held on it. Now the forest was full of darkness and evil, “There was no Piggy to
talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch” (Lord of
the Flies: 235). The children seem to have lost their consciousness and become mad. As
their screams become louder and louder, the lights in the sky seemed to flicker. The
earth and the sky seem to accompany the approaching chaos with the help of the
 48

thunder. The continuing, screams, the arising flames and the realization of the savage
made Ralph forget his experience in the forest: “He forgot his wounds, his hunger and
his thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet, rushing through the forest
toward the open beach” (Lord of the Flies: 239).

With the help of the great flame, the forest turned to hell. The fire was useful
finally. It covered the whole island and created a sign and the flames are finally seen by
a ship passing by. The naval officer, not knowing what might have happened to Ralph,
considers the situation as ‘fun and games’. The rescue came from civilization, but the
question is if it is possible to heal the children who lost their innocence and morality.
They became adults and returned to a primitive stage: “The ultimate irrationality is war.
Paradoxically, the children not only return to a primitive and infantile morality, but they
also degenerate into adults. They prove that, indeed, ‘children are but men of a smaller
growth.’ (Rosenfield, 1961: 100) Ralph, in the middle of the confusion and shocked by
the terror, cries:

The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first
time on the island; great shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole
body… Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall
through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy (Lord of the Flies: 242).

The novel finally argues that the innocence in human civilization is lost, as even
children can not attain it, modern man cannot rid himself of the decay that comes from
within, and innocence has become part of a defective system.

2.2 J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Innocence Preserved

The protagonist of The Catcher in The Rye by J. D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield,

can be taken as an excellent example of the youth whose mind is confused by the
frightening mazes of the adult world of the 20th century. Not wishing to be a part of the
society, Holden makes efforts to stay outside that world. Watching and criticizing
people from a balcony alone, he is always in conflict with the ‘urban jungle of twentieth
century’, the aim of which is to kill public morality and innocence, which is the sense
that makes a child a child rather than a corrupt adult. Holden tries to challenge and
 49

struggle in the name of all other children. Although he tries to keep himself away from
the corruption of the world, he experiences many unpleasant situations. On his way to
West, he encounters lots of ‘mazes’ which he does not want to ‘fall in’ once again.
Away from his family and home, his suffering strengthens his ability to cope with the
difficulties in this jungle. As an individual, the youth has the autonomy to develop his
own properties no matter how helpful his parents as mentors are in his life.

The problem of identity during the search for a real place in society and
confliction or confusion with the expectations in process, difficulty in interpreting the
modern world as the basic step to the future and making a synthesis of technological,
industrial advances with the normative values of the system drive the youth to a
dualistic situation just as he is entering in the complexity of the adult world.

P. H. Steinle states that such a fall offers opportunity for learning that shapes the
character’s growth in moral understanding, and Steinle continues the examples by
quoting from the writing of Henry James: “The hero had to fall, to pass beyond
childhood in an encounter with ‘Evil’ and ‘had to mature by virtue of the destruction of
his own egotism.’” (2000: 22).

In this respect, Holden feels that he does not belong to the society: however, he
has to live in this society and has to communicate with the people around him. He is
mostly alienated, which is the source of all his suffering. He tries both to protect
himself, by resisting maturity, and to assume his responsibilities in this society.

Holden is aware of the transition from childhood to the mature world: “I’m just
going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don’t they?”
(The Catcher in the Rye: 19). And going through this phase, he chooses to be different
from the rest of the society. He chooses to be free from the institutions that are like the
chains that keep him away from real ‘individualization’:

Especially in the first phase of modernization there has been a growing discontinuity
between the life of the children, whether in the family or the traditional school and in the
social world with its new and enlarged perspectives (Erikson, 1963: 31).
 50

In order to develop a full identity, the youth must flee with his own wings to
learn the experience of life. Being a part of a family may not be sufficient to develop the
integrity of the self, and may not provide a strong basis for the accomplishment of
personal autonomy: “Holden Caulfield, as both absurd hero and one ultimately happy at
his task, balancing between actions of individual responsibility and engagement in a
social community” (Steinle, 2000: 28).

It is necessary to interpret the social conditions of the period after World War II.
The bomb had not only destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also man’s capacity of
displaying humanity and innocence as well. Confused with the uncertainty and
complexity and the cruelty of the mass destruction caused by the atomic bomb, people
were driven to Great Depression. Fussel asserts that:

For Americans emerging from the Depression assisted by their asbundant accidental
resources of oil, coal, iron and other metals and their impressive manufacturing capacity,
the “shortages” and deprivations occasioned by the war were a distinct shock. And they
were shocking not just because of the “frontier” aura of “freedom” had governed for so
long most Americans’ imaginative and psychological relations with their peers. Visible
possession and conspicuous consumption had been the traditional signals of personal
distinction and even satisfactoriness in America, and now to be told by the government
that one could not buy and exhibit a new car or wear a new shoes or new silk stockings or
have new extension phone installed was a heavy blow to the psyche (1989: 195).

NBC radio news commentator H.V. Kaltenborn had said that “We are like
children playing with a concentrated instrument of death whose destructive potential our
little minds cannot grasp” (Steinle, 2000: 31).

The ‘innocence’ of America after World War II was not the same as that of the
earlier period. The concepts of stability and security had changed. The people who lived
under the shadow of the comfort fixed with assured safety, realized that there was no
guarantee for permanence. The post World War II period was called, among other
things, in other words, as ‘beyond innocence’:

American experience was repeatedly divided into categories of pre twentieth century
‘innocence’ and post World War II ‘beyond innocence’, making it clear that the end of
World War II brought about a profound change in sensibility – that ‘something happened’
that made America specificially, and Western world in general, distinctly different from
its historical past (Steinle; 2000: 32).
 51

Life was meaningless to the individual and there was no point in making
agreements with the society since nothing is guaranteed. People were seeking for
communal stability in which the private experience and imagination could last forever
by balancing the social responsibility with individual responsibility. At this point a
passive conformity to social order and to the concept of social organization can become
another hindrance set to prevent self-realization and individualization. Encountered by
the social expectations - such as a good marriage, an acceptable social status, good
looks, a real success approved by social order - the individual forgets his own
expectations from life and starts to live another life shaped by the norms of the
community leaving the individual, private desires in dormant situation. Holden, as the
critique of the 1950s, struggles against the seemingly responsible individuals which are
indeed unaware of their real personal potential for a better life. According to Holden,
they are just images whose inside is empty. He calls them ‘phony’, insisting on the
shallowness of their world view:

That’s just the trouble with all you morons. You never want to discuss anything. That’s
the way you can always tell a moron. They never want to discuss anything intellig- (The
Catcher in the Rye: 48).

On the verge of self-recognition, the fragmented mentality of “the catcher in the

rye” character struggles for survival. He understands that sacrifice is necessary for
survival. His heroic status is strengthened by his heroic state on ‘some crazy cliff’:

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.
Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big I mean – except me. And I
am standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do , I have to catch
everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they are running and they don’t
look where they are going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. I know
it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy (The Catcher in
the Rye: 179,180).

Holden tries to protect the innocence of childhood. He does not want to fall into
the centre of the corruption of the adult world, yet it is impossible to escape from this
reality. Adulthood brings with it the loss of innocence and the acquiring of experience.
As a part of the inevitable process of maturation, when someone enters adulthood, he or
she leaves innocence behind, and humans become the participants of the adult society
that share the same corruption, which they were once unaware of. In the novel, Holden
 52

has to sacrifice his own innocence in order to protect the other children, who are about
to fall from the same ‘crazy cliff’ and experience immoral situations that life serves to
them. Holden hopes to prevent other children from falling, and in doing this he gains
moral strength from his own fall. In fact, this is a phanthasy. His ego tries to find his
social role. In his phantasy, freed from the limitations of his social reality, the character
wants to use his mastery over the situations which occurred in this immoral, insecure
adult world. He takes a life experience into his phantasy world and masters it. The
phantasy world is another way of showing the unconscious issues of the self. In this
respect, saving the innocence is crucially important for Holden.

Squeezed between the insincerity of the mature community and the hopeful
requirements of the youthful situation, Holden experiences some dilemmas. Eventhough
he lives in a large society, he tries to escape from this complexity and wants to be alone,
because what he lives or experiences makes him feel as if he does not belong to society.
He finds some behaviours of people relatively odd and this makes him feel lonely, and
he finds it difficult to endure the thoughtless approaches of people. Although Holden
wants to be in a safe place apart from the ‘traps’ of the phoney people and fragmented
society, he sometimes realizes the bitterness of the idea of being lonely: “It was even
depressing out in the street. You couldn’t even hear any cars anymore. I got feeling so
lonesome and rotten, I even felt like waking Ackley up” (The Catcher in the Rye: 53).
Here both the alienation and the dillema of Holden is emphasized. Realizing that he can
not adapt to his school and friends, Holden, by a sudden decision, makes an escape from
the school Pency Prep without any hesitation, and dares to leave the school without
waiting for Wednesday, the day he was planning to go home:

When I was all set to go, When I had my bags and all, I stood for a while next to the stairs
and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I don’t know why. I
put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and
then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, ‘ Sleep tight, ya morons!’ I’ll bet I woke up
every bastard on the whole floor. Then I got the hell out (The Catcher in the Rye: 58).

Holden is in conflict with society, yet all he wants to do is to be accepted in a

community where everyone is equal and shares the same perfect morality. Holden,
however, escapes the so-called idealization which is expected from every young person.
 53

The adolascent’s orientation toward the main values of his society is also beset with
difficulties. Owing to the long period of preparation and the relative segregation of the
children’s world from that of the adults, the main values of the society are necessarily
presented to the child and adolescent in a highly selective way, with a strong idealistic
emphasis ( Erikson, 1963: 35).

Nevertheless, he can not keep his mind from the idea of living in a society where
he is known and remembered, although he criticizes the defects of the community:

What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-bye. I
mean I have left schools and places even I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate
that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like
to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse (The Catcher in the Rye: 8).

As Steinle explains:

Salinger manages this paradox through Holden’s fearful sensation of ‘dissappearing’. In

the duality of inside outside relations, the outside ‘self’ still depends upon the recognition
of other insiders to validate one’s very sense of existence ( 2000: 24).

Holden is in a dilemma which can be evaluated as the manifestation of

ambivalence towards the adult world. Holden seems to distinguish himself from that
world as an ‘outsider’ on the one hand, and on the other hand, he is also in contact with
the members of that world at every step. Holden mostly behaves like an ‘insider’. He is
always in communication with the people whom he calls ‘phoney’ on his way to New
York. This ambivalence shows his ‘struggle’ for communication with the adult world
and for its esteem, whereas he wants to make sure that he is exactly different from the
people and the roles that were planned for the children by the adults.

Holden acknowledges that he is using a ‘lousy vocabulary’ which, after the

publication of the novel, caused debates on whether the book should be censored or not.
Holden throughout in his speech expresses the contradictory aspects of his personal
temporal transition:

I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen.
It’s really ironical because I’m six-foot-two-and-a-half and I have grey hair. I really do.
The one side of my head – the right side – is full of millions of grey hairs. I’ve had them
 54

ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve.
Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. I don’t
give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age.
Sometimes I act a lot older that I am really do – but people never notice it. People never
notice anything (The Catcher in the Rye: 13).

He seems to be trapped between his critical ideas on society, represented with

the ‘grey hairs’, and his potentiality of childish behaviour representing his innocent side
alive. Mr. Spencer, one of his teachers, gives him a speech on life: “Life is a game, boy.
Life is a game that one plays according to the rules” (The Catcher in the Rye: 13).
Holden thinks that this game is the game the winners of which are always the privileged
ones:

Game my ass. Some game. If you get on the side, where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a
game all right – I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any
hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game (The Catcher in the Rye: 13).

This is quite mature reasoning for a boy of sixteen, because, with these words,
Holden also criticizes implicitly the unfair aspects of society.

Holden Caulfield, on his way to the West, represents the hero struggling for the
protection of innocence. It seems impossible, but Holden never gives up and tries to
balance his individual development and the personal participation in society. His
transition from childhood to adulthood must be considered through the effects of the
postwar period resulting in personal alienation, where life seemed meaningless. The
moral purity of America raised doubts about its authenticity. There was no sensible
answer for the justification of the use of the atomic bomb, which changed the lives of
people and made all the believes for future meaningless and absurd, because future was
gloomy. The importance of security and stability was lost. Steinle mentions William
Whyte, a social scientist, who wrote on the structure of middle class society and the
value of social ethics during 1950s:

Whyte, in The Orgainization Man (1956), found Americans to be following what he

termed the ‘social ethic’in pursuit of security and stability. The social ethic, according to
Whyte was grounded in the belief that the existance of the individual was secondary to
the needs of society; ‘meaningless as an individual, man found his worth in social
collaboration, where ‘by sublimiting himself in the group, he helps produce a whole that
is greater than the sum of its parts’. Practice of the social ethic then, was aimed at
‘creating an equilibrium in which society’s needs of the individual are one and the same’-
 55

an ethos that could best be accomplished by ‘applying the methods of science to human
relations’ so that conflics (‘breakdowns in communication’ and ‘obstacles to consensus’ )
would be eliminated (Steinle, 2000: 32,33).

In his conversation with Mr. Spencer, Holden is asked whether he feels any
concern for his future, and he replies that: “‘Oh I feel some concern for my future all
right. Sure. Sure I do.’ I thought about it for a minute. ‘But not too much, I guess. Not
too much I guess.’”(The Catcher in the Rye: 18). Holden as a critique of the
commitments, which are inherently allocated to the young by the older generations and
by the society, seems to have lost his interest for the future and does not seem to have
certain ‘contractions’ with the ‘institutions’ of the community, such as ‘a good
marriage’ or ‘a good career’ which support him to afford the latest sports cars, fame
which makes him shine in the society. Sitting in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel,
Holden watches the girls waiting for their dates. He makes some deductions according
to their appearance and, then, suddenly, he feels sorry for their future. He seems to be
taking care of the future of these girls, whom he has never seen in his life:

In a way it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would
happen to all of them. When they got out of school or college I mean. You figured most
of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles
they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you
beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean.
Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring (The Catcher in the Rye: 129).

Holden criticizes the shallowness of the people who never care for the ‘other
side of the society’, who are never interested in the artistic expressions of a work of art,
who never discuss the credibility of the rules or the sincerity of the social relations.
Their attitude seems hypocritical to him, without creating helpful innovations and new
perspectives for the society. Holden seeks for a peaceful state and he wants to save the
children who are on the verge of the ‘fall’ from innocence. Altough he mostly seems
pessimistic, he never loses his hope for a better society. As it was stated before, Holden
could be considered to have lost his interest for future; nevertheless, he is always in
struggle for a better life that the next generation would live. No matter how alienated he
is, he never gives up worrying about the other people and his futile optimism never
diminishes till the end of the novel. His hope is his main tool to regain the sense of
innocence.
 56

Through his search for a place of his own in the society as an individual, Holden
tries to achieve his uniqueness apart from the existing universal social patterns. His
problematic situation of the self makes him more critical about the people and the
phoney ‘success’ they gain in their life. The combination of his inner dynamics and
communal expectations does not match each other. This complexity and the obscurity
lead him to alienation from the society he lives in. His choices depend on his own
autonomy and power. Holden’s escape from Pency Prep can not be taken as a simple
childish freak or it cannot be said that it is because of being homesick. This escape can
be taken as a representative of his loneliness and aspiration for freedom which is the
basic concept for youth. At this level it seems that it is impossible for him to achieve
both personal and social integrity at the same time. This drives Holden into illusory
identities created by his phantasy. He takes a life experience into his phantasy world and
masters it. Phantasies or dreams are reservoirs of what the individual feels or keeps in
the deepest areas of the psyche. At every step of the process of becoming a mature
person, hidden sides of the psyche influence the individual’s interpretation of the world
and environment. In his phantasy world, Holden becomes ‘the catcher in the rye’, who
saves the innocence of the children by protecting them from falling into the corruption
of the mature world. In these phantasies, Holden is in communication with the adult
world eventhough he tries to stay out of the inauthenticity of this real world. Holden is
in a moral struggle with everything ugly, unfair, evil, corrupt or ‘phoney’. In fact, the
role of Holden is to make people aware of the reality of the tragic disposition of the
society which they escape from and shock them with the sudden realization of the fact.
No one should blame Holden for his rebellious behaviour or the vocabulary he uses. He
could be said to be forced by the social conditions of the time to behave in a restless
manner:

If all boys were ‘unusual and worthy of understanding’ and, like Holden, ‘bewildered at
the complexity of modern life, unsure of themselves, shocked by the spectacle of
perversity and evil around them,’ Smith asked whether adult readers were not ‘equally
shocked by the knowledge that even children cannot escape this contact and awareness?’ (
Steinle, 2000: 46, 47)

The social panorama the postwar period reflected the chaos and the extremes of
the complexity made society more fragmented and difficult to understand. Society had
dual vision: dream and nightmare together. Individual alienation brought by the futile
 57

search for an ideal future was the part of the nightmare, whereas the realization of the
need for hope to cope with these difficulties is the part of Holden’s dream like
experiences in his phantasy world. No matter how desperate a vision the American
society had, the postwar period of the 1950s created its own comfort in the illusions in
which people created their own ideal society.

The change in human experience as a result of postwar uncertainty and crisis

also shaped the characterisitics of Holden:

The young who grow up in this world are completely demoralized: they characterize
themselves as the generation that drew a blank. The belief in continuity, the sense of
future that holds promises, disappears: the certainty of sudden obliteration cuts across
every long term plan, and every activity is more or less reduced to the time-span of a
single day,on the assumption that it may be the last day….. Suicides become more
frequent….., and the taking of the drugs to produce either exhilaration or sleep becomes
practically universal ( Steinle, 2000: 171).

What Holden is striving for is just to make the world a place of peace and
innocence where everybody respects each other rather than playing dirty tricks or
exploiting companionship. He thinks that the appearance of people should match what
they keep in their soul. He criticizes those people who are not as sophisticated as they
seem. He sees the meaninglessness of being gorgeous without living a ‘real’ life which
includes the genuine items of gorgeousness. In this respect, Holden criticizes two of his
friends: Ackley, the boy next room, and Stradlater, his roommate. About Ackley;
Holden states ironically:

He started cleaning his goddom fingernails with the end of a match. He was always
cleaning his fingernails. It was very funny, in a way. His teeth were always mossy
looking, and his ears were always dirty as hell, but he was always cleaning his fingernails.
I guess he thought that made him a very neat guy (The Catcher in the Rye: 26).

Holden cannot endure deceptive appearance. He always criticizes the so-called

sincerity of the people. Stradlater is one of the vain, ostentatious boys who never
interrogate the situations of life:

He always looked all right, Stradlater, but for instance, you should’ve seen the razor he
shaved himself with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather, hairs, and crap. He
never cleaned it or anything. He always looked good when he was finished fixing himself
up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did. The reason he fixed
 58

himself up to look good was because he was madly in love with himself (The Catcher in
the Rye: 31).

Harison Smith, states that:

Without realizing it he is seeking the understanding and affection which adults could give
him - or even his classmates, who are perhaps an unreasonably repulsive lot of lads. But
how could they be fond of this overgrown, precocious, and yet childish boy? His
roommate was an arrogant hunter of girls; the boy next door never brushed his teeth and
was always picking at his pimples; the group of "intellectuals," the grinds, and the
athletes were all phonies to him. But Holden's sense of phoniness is never contempt. It is
worse; it is despair (1951).

Holden’s alienation is the source of his pain and desperate situation. He tries to
protect himself by hiding his emotions behind his alienation. He wants to prove his
uniqueness by “shooting the people in his red hunting hat”: “ Like hell it is. …. This is a
people shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat” (The Catcher in the Rye: 26). The red
hunting hat is something that belongs to him and makes him feel different from the rest
of the world. The concept of ‘shooting’ people could be taken as another phantasy in
which Holden accomplishes his desire to make the world a more desirable place,
without phonies

Holden struggles against the deceptive environment. His sincerity can still be
questioned, because he himself acknowledges his faults for example lying to other
people: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful” (The Catcher in
the Rye: 20). He gets on a train and accidentally meets Mrs. Morrow, the mother of
Ernest Morrow, one of his friends. Holden does not like Ernest since he is always busy
snapping his wet towel at people’s back. At first he introduces himself with a different
name and then talks about Ernest as if he is someone sensitive who cares about the
needs of others. Lying is a way of tricking people. He becomes one of the victims of the
deceptive world which he criticizes. What makes the reader believe his sincerity is his
own criticism of himself. Holden, at least, acknowledges his fault unlike the people who
could never see their own shortcomings or who believe that they are someone important
although they have a superficially-minded world view: “You take a guy like Morrow
that’s always snapping their towel at people’s asses - really trying to hurt somebody
with it – they don’t just stay a rat while they’re kid. They stay a rat their whole life”
(The Catcher in the Rye: 61).
 59

With his right observations, Holden makes perfect inducements and criticism in
contrast to his age. On the other hand he never tries to understand these people. In fact,
his point of view includes the inevitable complicated truths about life and human
relationships. He aspires for a simple world. He cannot endure a world which is always
in the process of change. He seeks for stability and the sense of sameness. The first
implication is in his request to Stradlater, to ask Jane about the kings in the back row:
“Ask her if she still keeps her kings in the back row” (The Catcher in the Rye: 38). Jane
is a friend of Holden who lived next door. He is really worried about Jane because she
is too nice and cute to date with Stradlater:

I just kept laying there on Ely’s bed, thinking about Jane and all. It just drove me stark
staring mad when I thought about her and Stradlater parked somewhere in that fat-assed
Ed Banky’s car. Everytime I thought about it, I felt like jumping out the window. The
thing is, you didn’t know Stradlater. I knew him. Most guys at Pencey just talked about
having sexual intercourse with girls all the time – like Ackley, for instance – but old
Stradlater really did it (The Catcher in the Rye: 52).

The death of his brother Allie had also a great impact on Holden. It can be said
that Allie’s death changed Holden’s world view because he was the one whom Holden
believed to understand best. With the loss of Allie, he seems to have lost connection
with the world in which he is really understood. This may be taken as one of the main
reasons for Holden’s desire for stability. Allie’s death traumatized him and made him
aware of both the cruelty and fragility of life. Holden is terrified by the idea of change
and disappearance.
Holden’s recurring thoughts about the ducks in the Central Park bring with them
the similarity between Holden’s ideas on his own disappearance and that of the ducks.
He frequently asks the cab drivers where the ducks go in winter: “By any chance do you
happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen
to know, by any chance?” (The Catcher in the Rye: 64). In the following fragment
Holden’s query about the ducks while he is again talking to a cab driver is brought up
again:

The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck
or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves – go south or
something (The Catcher in the Rye: 86).
 60

The driver starts to talk about the fish and says that fish do not go anywhere and
it is the same for the ducks too:

They live right in the goddam ice. It’s their nature for Chirssake. They get frozen right in
one position for the whole winter.
Yeah? What do they eat then? I mean if they are frozen solid,they can’t swim around
looking for food and all.”
Their bodies, for chrissake – what’s a mattrer with ya? Their bodies take in nutrition and
all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that’s in the ice. They got their pores
open the whole time. That’s their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean? ( The Catcher
in the Rye: 87,88).

The driver tries to say that it is the way nature forces them to live, and it is just
for a temporary situation:

Plainly, the the duck’s dissappearancies related to those nagging questions Holden has
abouth death. He is concerned not merely with his own, but the deaths of others as well.
The metonymical associations are clear, for when he speaks of the ducks again, he moves
from their dissapearence directly into thoughts of his death, and from there thoughts about
his dead brother, Allie (Salzberg, 1990: 202).

Sitting down on one of the benches in Central Park, Holden thinks about the
ducks again, and, finding no one of them around, a sudden idea on dying of pneumonia
emerges in his mind:

I got pneumonia and die. I started pictureing millions of jerks coming to my funeral and
all. My grandfather from Detroit, that keeps calling out the numbers of the sreets when
you ride on a goddam bus with him, and my aunts – I have about fifty aunts – and all my
lousy cousins.what a mob’d be there. They all came when Allie died, the whole goddam
stupid bunch of them (The Catcher in the Rye: 161).

He goes on with his phantasy about his funeral, imagining his mother, father and
Pheobe, his sister:

I felt sorry as hell for my mother and father. Especially my mother, because she still isn’t
over my brother Allie yet. I kept picturing her not knowing what to do with all my suits
and athletic equipment and all. The only good thing, I knew she wouldn’t let old Pheobe
come to my goddam funeral because she was only a little kid. That was the only good part
(The Catcher in the Rye: 161).

Holden does not want his sister Pheobe to come to his funeral because he
believes that she is too young and fragile to face death. He does not want her to be
traumatized or shocked, like she was at Allie’s death. With the phantasy about his own
 61

death, Holden imagines the picture in which he can judge his parents’ love for him. He
may judge, in his unconscious, whether they miss him or not. This is because of his
feeling of loneliness. Indeed, he desperately needs to be loved and accepted by his
parents, and society.
Holden frequently makes phantasies about being lost, or being dead, or
committing suicide. In the beginning of the book, he mentions the school match of
Saxon Hall: “It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide
or something if old Pencey didn’t win” (The Catcher in the Rye: 6). On his way to Mr.
Spencer for a good-bye he similarly gets the feeling of disappearing:

After I got across the road, I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy
afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were
disappearing every time you crossed a road (The Catcher in the Rye: 9).

While he was walking on the Fifth Avenue, Holden suddenly gets a similar
feeling about disappearing:

Everytime I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam kerb, I had this
feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down,
down and nobody’d ever see me again. Boy, it did scare me. You can’t imagine. I started
sweating like a bastard-my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started
doing something else. Everytime I’d get to the end of a block I’d make believe I was
talking to my brother Allie. I’d say to him ‘Allie don’t let me disappear. Allie don’t let me
disappear. Allie don’t let me disappear. Please, Allie.’ And then, when I’d reach the other
side of the street without disappearing, I’d thank him. Then it would start all over again as
soon as I got to the next corner (The Catcher in the Rye: 204).

Holden, by his phantasies about being lost seems to reflect his alienation and
desire for staying outside the society. He wants to be invisible to avoid the trivial
conversations, stupid situations created by thoughtless people that he cannot tolerate.
Nevertheless, his experience on the Fifth Avenue may be the sign of his breakdown,
which causes him to be taken to a hospital for care. Holden frequently creates mental
images of his death. Sitting on a banch in the subway he imagines that he has cancer
and is about to die:

I’d had this sore on the inside of my lip for about two weeks. So figured I was getting
cancer… I figured I’d be dead in a couple of months because I had cancer. I really did. I
was even positive I would be (The Catcher in the Rye: 202-203).
 62

His is so lonely that he has nothing to lose in his life and he never feels sorry for
what he might lose:

One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something – it used to drive my
mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I
never seem to have anything that if I lost it I’d care too much. Maybe that’s why I’m
partly yellow (The Catcher in the Rye: 94).

He also does not have many friends whom he may trust: “The trouble was,
though my address book only has about three people in it. Jane and this man, Mr.
Antolini, that awes my teacher at Elkton Hills, and my father’s office number” (The
Catcher in the Rye: 142).

Holden has also some naïve ideas on relationships. He does not want to be
included in something that he does not find pure, innocent or sincere. Holden witnesses
a couple making fun of themselves. He watches them and sees them squirting water on
each other:

The thing is, tough, I don’t like the idea. It stinks if you analyse it. I think if you don’t like
a girl, you shouldn’t horse around her at all, and if you do like her, then you are supposed
to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff
to it, like squerting water all over it (The Catcher in the Rye: 66).

Holden feels sorry for the girls who are involved in sexual relationships. Even if
he gets the opportunity to share his time with them, he does not try to get the best
advantage of it. This may show the naivety of the mind of the character rather than the
cunning ideas on how to get a girl like the other ‘guys’ around him do. Even if he
desperately needs somebody to share his loneliness, he does not make any
companionship.

Anyway, something always happens. I came quite close to doing it a couple of times,
though. One time in particular, I remember. Something went wrong, though - I don’t even
remember what any more. The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close
to doing it with a girl – a girl that isn’t a prostitute or anything, I mean - she keeps telling
you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never
know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or
whether they’re telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on
you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is I get to feeling sorry for them. I
mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really
watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just
 63

hasn’t any brains. I don’t know. They tell me to stop, so I stop. I always wish I hadn’t,
after I take them home, but keep doing it anyway (The Catcher in the Rye: 97).

This is a part of his battle against the adult world, adult idea and adult
experience. Holden wants to feel the existence of the moral values in society. When he
realizes that the ultimate fate of childhood is the loss of innocence, he feels depressed.
His point of view roaming in the complexity of the society expresses his personal need
for stability and security.

Holden wants children to stay away from the world of adult phoniness and adult
experiences. According to him, children always look all right even when they spit on
the pillow while they are sleeping, as he finds this in his sister Pheobe, whom he loves
most and protects from the dirty experiences of the adult world. He even wonders about
what will happen when the children see the dirty words on the school wall:

But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written
‘ - you’ on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Pheobe and all other
little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then some dirty
kid would tell them – all cockeyed naturally – what it meant, and how they would all
think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days (The Catcher in the
Rye: 207).

Then Holden phantasies himself catching and punishing the one who wrote it,
but finally realizes that no one can find a better place that’s nice and peaceful, because
there isn’t any. Finally, he understands that it is impossible to keep purity of childhood
alive in that ‘phoney society’.
 64

CONCLUSION

The present thesis is a comparative study of childhood in The Catcher in the Rye
by Jerome David Salinger and Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The first chapter is
a theoretical one, discussing the child as a literary motif and archetype, and the
representation of the child in English and American literature in general. As an
archetypal figure, the child is a recurring motif through literary history from the
Renaissance to the experienced child characters of the 20th century literature. In
Romanticism and later in the Victorian Age, the child has been rendered as a symbol of
innocence, redemption, freedom, abandonment, wisdom and strength. Functioning as an
important image in literature, the archetypal child offers a revival of the experience in
adulthood, helping the establishment of the balance between the conscious and the
unconscious, past and present, image and reality, immaturity and maturity, and, as such,
being a definite literary concern, it allows the consideration of a “myth of childhood” in
literature.

The second chapter of the present thesis is a practical approach to the fictional
representation of childhood in 20th century literature by providing a comparative
thematologic analysis of The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies. The American
writer J. D. Salinger, in his novel The Catcher in the Rye, and English writer William
Golding, three years later, in The Lord of the Flies, both influenced by the experience of
a war, the social tensions of their epoch, and by their own experience of life, present
two points of view on the experience of childhood and, in general, on the phenomenon
that established itself in the process of the literary evolution as “the myth of childhood”
that was developed and consolidated as a literary tradition by the Romantic poets and
Victorian novelists.

Salinger represents the voice of the post-war American generation of the urban
American youth, creating a fictional world without heroic characters, rejecting
deception and falsehood, and showing admiration for sincerity. Displaying the artistic
credo of a Victorian novelist, Salinger suggests that the ideal persons are children,
 65

followed by adolescents, and only a small number of the adults manage to escape
untouched by the corruption that accompanies maturization.

In the novel, the main character Holden Caulfield expresses loneliness and
alienation from a “phoney society” of taboos and conventions that are but a masque for
hypocrisy and egoism. His sense of alienation is that of a nonconformist who is willing
to be at war with the entire world, but his rebellion is finally a pathetic gesture supplied
by a noisy innocence, a dream and a fantasy that result at the passing of the border from
childhood to maturity.

Salinger closely observes in Holden Caulfield what psychologists call the

“phenomenon of immaturity”, that is the desire not to grow up, as it will imply
subordination to official institutions or norms of behaviour that proved themselves, in
the eyes of the post-war young American generation, phoney and wrong. If society,
which Holden equates to the world of grown-ups, does not give a “damn” about him,
than he does not give a “damn” about it either, which is also due to the fact that the
society after the war was characterised by obstructing qualities for the young
generation’s development, such as the splitting of consciousness, disillusion, scepticism,
etc.

The spirit of humanity being asleep, the result could be nothing but the birth of
barbarism and loss of values. A way in which the human being might become aware of
a solution is the dream, representing a means of materialisation of the human basic
needs, instincts and archetypes. In the novel, the dream represents the unifying theme
that conveys Holden’s declared desire to be “a catcher in the field of life”. The children
who are playing in the rye can fall into the abyss, the childhood is thus threatened, and
Holden wants to defend it.

The dream represents the wish of the character to protect the children and
preserve childhood experience, that is to preserve the love and innocence in the general
frame of human condition. On the hand, to be a catcher in the rye in a phoney world
means to escape from the real world and to embark on a permanent quest for love, soul-
 66

to-soul communication, and true relationship. On the other hand, Holden is too old to
enjoy the innocent amusements of a child and too young to be accepted into the world
of grown-ups. Then Holden’s justified reaction is one of a rebellious withdrawal into a
fantasy world populated with happy children safely playing in a field of rye under his
careful protection. Yet, even if Holden refuses to integrate in the mature universe, he
does not reject it but searches for the alternatives that would contain the general human
principles of wisdom, love, virtue.

Holden does not want to fall in the core of the phoniness of the adult world, yet
it is impossible to escape from this reality. Adulthood brings with it the loss of
innocence and the acquiring of experience. As a part of the inevitable process of
maturity, when someone enters adulthood, he or she leaves the innocence behind
himself or herself, and humans become the participants of the adult society that share
the same corruption that they were once unaware of. Yet, the message in the novel is
that the myth of childhood should be preserved, as childhood seems still to be a viable
alternative, which the main character is aware of, since Holden tries to protect the
innocence of childhood.

A contrary view of the child and the childhood experience is expressed in Lord
of the Flies by William Golding in a more philosophical and visionary manner, at the
same time deeply rooted in allegory and mythic symbolism. Golding puts an end to the
myth of childhood, following Richard Hughes in A High Wind in Jamaica by treating
childhood in an unconventional and non-sentimental way.

Golding destroys the myth of childhood by situating a group of boys on an

inhabited island and presenting the reverse evolution from the modern civilisation to the
animal, primitive condition of the man, since all the children’s attempts, led by Ralph
and Piggy, to create a society based on democracy result in a total failure when the
“wildness” and “the animal deeds” of human nature prevail over reason and common
sense.
 67

The novel clearly demonstrates what the author himself called “the end of
innocence, the darkness of the human heart”. This is actually the main theme of the
novel, which is developed in strong allegorical connection to the primordial sin of the
human Fall from Eden, the children presenting the reverse evolution of the human
civilisation that falls into barbarism, primitivism, crime and obedience to the “lord of
the flies”: another name given to the devil.

The theme of evil is connected with “the nature of the most dangerous animal –
the man” and in Golding’s opinion has come to declare openly that the world is “ill with
people”. Golding’s aim was to examine under what circumstances the social and
psychological regress would be possible when the emergence of the human instincts for
destruction, the evil in general, are inevitable. Golding has thus attempted at making a
research in the psychological nature of man in order to understand not just the way the
society influences the person, but rather how human nature determines the features of
the society created by him.

Golding is interested first of all in the negative features and hence he searches
for the causes of the social deficiencies in the disharmony of the human mentality. But
here might be a problem mixing up the social aspect with the individual one, the
deficiencies of some definite political systems with the psychological aspect. Hence the
use of children and of the experience of childhood since neither the children nor
childhood experience are yet altered or determined by definite social standards. Hence
an island has been used as the background since an isolated island is a completely
isolated world, where the possibility of instituting a new society can be tested.
Childhood is also used to provide a stronger effect on the reader, since the generally
accepted as innocent and pure children reveal the emergence of evil, its cause and
effects. In this respect, Golding’s characters are not only concrete boys with their
childlike logic and behaviour, but also parts of a certain social and psychological
typology. Here one may find the most interesting philosophical lines of the novel, where
the author describes the vices of the society and of the human being, and analyses the
characters from different points of view concerning their connection with the evil. Each
of the main characters in the novel presents his own position in the struggle of the two
 68

worlds - the world of savagery and the world of civilisation - the main idea of the novel
being based on the theme of this struggle, and each of the main characters in the novel is
a symbol of some significant counterparts in the course of this struggle: Simon, for
example, a “Christ figure”, stands for pure goodness; Piggy with his glasses stands for
intelligence, clear-sightedness, and social order. The most important children–symbols
are Ralph, who stands for civilization, order and democracy, and Jack, who stands for
anarchy and savagery.

At the end of the Lord of the Flies there is some hope for the future in the
knowledge that Ralph has acquired. He understands the conflict of good and evil, ideal
and real, which exists in man. Unlike Simon and Piggy, Ralph seems resourceful
enough to elude death and to carry his knowledge back to civilisation, and there to have
some influence of fellow men.

However, in general, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies expresses another

view, this time contrary to Salinger, on childhood in that the myth of childhood that
reflects the harmless and naive mind of the infant becomes the myth of universal
savagery in the form of childhood experience. The modern child becomes the part of a
hellish figure, unlike the child in the Romantic period that leads to heaven and the child
in the Victorian period that knows how to lead to the personal accomplishment in the
social background. Now it is the end of innocence and the reign of the darkness of
man’s heart, which shatter the purity that traditionally has been emphasized as one of
the major qualities of the child and childhood experience.

As a result of the close study of these two novels, it may be said that there are
two perspectives in the 20th century representation of the child and childhood in
literature. This dualism of literary representation of childhood in the post war Anglo-
American literature is expressed best in The Catcher in the Rye by Jerome David
Salinger and Lord of the Flies by William Golding in that both novels clearly reveal two
distinct and, at the same time, contrary views on childhood.
 69

The 20th century novel imposed a dual vision upon childhood, and this dual
condition of childhood and the child figure as an important fictional motif reflects the
contradictory ideals in the post-war period in that Salinger and Golding express two
distinct and contrary points of view, one positive another negative, one optimistic
another pessimistic, and, concerning the archetype of child and the myth of childhood in
literature, one preserves their status, whereas the other destroys the myth and gives a
totally different view on the child.

In English literature, the Romantic period was the first to put emphasis on the
child figure by presenting it as a symbol of innocence and purity, which is also
emphasized by the later Victorian writers. In the post-war period of the 20th century,
American literature preserved this view in The Catcher in The Rye, suggesting that
childhood experiences include naivety and innocence, whereas the English novel of the
era destroyed the myth of childhood in Lord of the Flies, suggesting that the experience
of the childhood period would reveal the darkness of man’s heart.

Salinger, representing the post-war American fiction, was a more or less faithful
follower of the Romantic and Victorian literary tradition, in that it preserves the idea of
the innocence of childhood against the materialism of the corrupt, phoney adult world.
The dream, a basic way of the archetype to become accessible to the mind, clearly
shows this sub-conscious need of the human being to protect childhood as the only hope
for human fulfilment, of preservation of deepest human values. Contrary to this view,
that is, leaving no hope for the rational existence of the human race, and even for the
further evolution of human civilization, is William Golding with his Lord of the Flies.
The novel claims that humanity has reached a cultural dead end, a period of crisis
without escape, a period characterized, in Golding’s own words, by “the end of
innocence, the darkness of man’s heart”. What is striking is that not even children
would be a matter of hope, but they actually express the fall of the human race into
primitivism and barbarism.
 70

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INDEX

Aldridge,John, 29
Joyce, James, 24, 31
Baldwin, James, 3 Jung, Carl, 7, 8, 9, 14, 19
Ballantyne, R. M., 25, 26
Barnard, Robert, 16, 24 Klein, Marcus, 29
Barrett, William, 29, 30
Baym, Nina, 28, 29 Locke, John, 17
Beckett, Samuel, 40
Bellow, Saul, 3 Malamud, Bernard, 3
Blake,William, 2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 16, Miller, Merle, 32
21, 22 Muir, Kenneth, 7
Bloom, Harold, 21
Bronte, sisters, 22 Pearson, Carol S., 37, 45, 46
Butler, Marilyn, 7 Pound, Ezra, 28
Byrnes,Alice, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12
Reilly, Patrick, 34, 40, 42
Defoe,Daniel, 25 Rosenfield, Claire, 36, 39, 42, 45, 46,
DeMott,Benjamin, 31 47, 48
Dickens,Charles, 2, 22 Rowe, Joyce, 31
Dundes,Alan, 8, 9
Dutheil,Martine Hennard, 25, 26 Salinger, Jerome David, 2, 3, 4, 27, 30,
31, 48, 53, 64, 65, 68, 69
Eliot,George, 22 Salzberg, Joel, 60
Eliot,T. S., 28 Seng, Peter, 32
Eliot,T.S., 28 Smith, Harison, 57, 58
Erikson,Erik, 11, 38, 49, 52 Snider, Cliffton, 8
Steedman,Carolyn, 10
Faulkner,William, 29 Steinle, Pamela Hunt, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56,
Fitzgerald,Scott, 29, 43 57
Forster,E. M., 39 Stevens, Wallace, 28
Freud,Sigmund, 37, 46 Styron, William, 3
Frye,Northrop, 21
Talon, Henri, 34
Golban,Petru, 12, 13, 18, 22, 23 Tate, Allen, 28
Golding,William, 2, 3, 4, 26, 34, 37, 43, Trilling, Lionel, 6, 7
64, 66, 67, 68, 69
Whyte, William, 54
Heiserman,Arthur, 32 Williams, William Carlos, 28
Hemingway,Ernest, 29 Woolf, Virginia, 24
Howe, Irving, 30 Wordsworth, William, 2, 6, 7, 10, 15,
Howe, Irving, 30 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22