Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0126/01262.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 19KB | 351 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01262}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Works of William Golding
Summary of Pincher Martin}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Golding, William}
$Affiliation{Department Of English, Bard College}
$Subject{christopher
life
rock
island
christopher's
nat
stone
body
like
character
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{}
$Log{See The Stone Dwarf*0126201.scf
}
Title:       Works of William Golding
Book:        Pincher Martin
Author:      Golding, William
Critic:      Dewsnap, Terence
Affiliation: Department Of English, Bard College

Summary of Pincher Martin

Chapters 1 and 2

     Christopher Martin, lone survivor of a torpedoed British warship, is
floating on a life belt in the Atlantic. Coming to the edge of an island rock,
he struggles forward, ingeniously using limpets as hand and footholds to scale
the rock.

Comment:

     The journey of Christopher Martin is symbolic, representing a process of
self-discovery. There are two poles in Christopher's personality. He is
Pincher Martin, grasping, selfish, conniving, as determined to satisfy his
instincts as a lobster. He is Christopher-Christ bearer-making a difficult
trip across water, in the manner of Saint Christopher, as a test of his
spiritual potential. As the story develops, he fails to realize this
potential, and so is destroyed.

     Christopher, as we see him, is literally without direction, subject to
the motions of waves and currents. We later learn that these are appropriate
circumstances, for his life has been a meaningless submission to pressures of
pleasure and pain. His present situation is representative of his career as
citizen and sailor. The first quality that reveals itself as he struggles up
the rocky slope of the island is his instinct for preservation. He is, as he
remarks, "Like a limpet." (A limpet is a large mollusk with a conical shell
and a broad flat base that grips rocks or timber by suction). Tough, elastic,
hard-shelled, adapted to the struggle with sea and rock, the limpets are
representations of Christopher, the mere instinctual being. Later, as the
personality of Christopher expands and we know of his greedy, selfish past,
the symbol of the lobster, made more formidable by his claws, becomes
appropriate to the character.

     By his rendering of concrete detail as seen by Christopher, Golding makes
us share the struggle for survival. We feel his weightlessness in the water.
We feel the pebbles against his cheek as he struggles up the rocky shore.
After establishing this empathy, or sense of identity, between reader and
character, Golding can go on to give us the sordid details of Christopher's
life without risking the loss of our sympathy.

     It should be mentioned that most of the novel is hallucinatory. In
Chapter 1, as he floats in the water, Christopher thinks he is kicking off
his heavy seaboots. At the end of the novel we learn that he died wearing his
seaboots, and we are forced to conclude that the entire struggle for survival
is imaginary, the projection of a mind obsessed with the idea of
self-preservation.

Chapters 3 and 4

     Coming to in a trench he is tempted to despair, but drives himself
forward. He is determined to pit what he has, his slicker, life belt, and
knife against the elements. His first thought is for shelter. He discovers,
under a slab of stone leaning against a side of the trench, an opening
large enough for him to crawl into. Thinking back, he recalls his friend
Nat sitting precariously on the rail of the ship, his face in his hands.
He crawls from the trench to search for fresh water. Eventually he discovers
a small cave containing a pool left by the rain. Encouraged, he drags rocks
to the highest part of the island to stand as a rescue signal. He builds a
three-foot high pyramid of four boulders resembling a dwarf. Thinking of
food, he forces himself to eat sea anemones, soft, red, flower-like animals
clinging to the rock.

Comment:

     Most of the struggles of Christopher are on the level of survival. He
goes through primitive stages of social development, like those of the boys on
the island in Lord of the Flies, and the savage creatures in The Inheritors.
He instinctively works for shelter, water, and food, just as any beast does.
But then, since he is a man, his struggle goes beyond mere survival as he
thinks about rescue, and builds a replica of a man out of stone. This stone
dwarf is symbolic. Christopher's whole existence on the island will be
devoted to building an image of a man-himself-in his own mind. Christopher
does not yet realize how perfectly the stone dwarf mirrors himself. As in the
Castle Rock episodes of Lord of the Flies, the stone represents the hardness
of heart of the persons connected with it. This is the material he has to work
with-rock-in creating a human personality. His efforts are limited by
circumstances of setting and also, symbolically, by the spiritual deprivations
in his own soul. The stone beckons to passing ships by saying, "Here I am;
I am a man." But it also reveals that this man is a man of stone, a man
without human feeling. So far, then, the definition of man is limited.
Christopher shows the instincts of the animal-the anemone or the limpet. And
he shows the intelligence to make patterns out of stone. One other
manifestation of human awareness is present in Christopher's friend Nat,
meditating as he sits on the ship's rail. Like Simon, in Lord of the Flies,
Nat is a religious man. But so far, this part of Christopher is unawakened.

Character Analyses:

     Christopher - intelligent, selfish, aggressive, a man with an enormous
need to survive in the flesh because he possesses no knowledge of the spirit.

     Nathaniel - a foil to Christopher. A religious mystic.

Chapters 5 and 6

     He recalls that Nat had predicted his death and had warned him that,
because of the condition of his soul, his afterlife would be a complete
negation, with a "black lightning destroying everything that we call life."
He had called Nat a fool, and denied that he was soon to die. Now he continues
that denial by hanging onto life on the rock. He cracks the shells of mussels
and eats the bodies to keep his flesh alive. He goes through the
identification pictures and papers in his pocket so as to preserve his
identity. He builds his rock statue to four feet by placing a large stone
at the base. He controls his existence by imposing names on his immediate
surroundings, for example, Gull Cliff, Food Cliff, High Street, and Picadilly.
When he begins to name the nearby island rocks, "the Teeth," he is horrified
at the thought that he is living inside these "Teeth."

Comment:

     Nat, like Simon, makes an accurate prophecy that is not believed. Later,
when we learn that all of Christopher's experiences on the island are
imaginary, we realize how much his hell is a complete negation of life. Not
only is he deprived of all of the human pleasures that he is used to, but the
whole experience becomes nothing but a figment of the imagination of a
drowning man who refuses to believe in his inevitable death. When Christopher
confidently asserts that his life on the island is "the ordinary experience
of living," he is revealing that the ordinary experience of living is, too, an
illusion. All of his life is just a barren existence as that on the rock, a
chain of selfish gestures, of seductions and betrayals.

     Two important and related symbols are established in these chapters-teeth
and Chinese boxes. Christopher, who has always eaten the weaker person,
devouring them with his hands, or his mouth, or his body, is now being
devoured-as if he is a mouth inside another mouth, which is inside other
mouths. The sets of teeth are arranged inside each other like Chinese boxes.
That is what makes the teeth-like rocks so frightening. They are devouring
his life and sanity just as he has done to others, and he is terrified at the
fittingness of the retribution. He realizes that his is no longer the largest
mouth in a world rapacious mouths. Just as the mussels are his food, so he is
food to the larger forces of destruction represented in the looming rocks. The
thought of these enormous teeth around him is so horrifying that, at the end
of Chapter 6, he cannot sleep.

Chapters 7 and 8

     Martin thinks of the past. He recalls an interview with his commanding
officer before he received his commission. He thinks of when he was a
civilian, an actor, and of his affair with his producer's wife. Returning to
the present, he takes a silver candy wrapper from his pocket and ties it on
the head of the stone dwarf, so that it shines in the sun. Then, as a signal
to passing airplanes, he heaps up seaweed in the pattern of a cross. While he
is gathering seaweed close to the shore, the sight of a lobster sends him
scurrying onto the rock shuddering with loathing. His agitated mind ranges so
freely that he forgets the immediate task and thinks back to when he was
ordered by his producer to take, as a second part, one of the seven deadly
sins-Greed, because he was born with "both hands out to grab." As his
thoughts flit about, he begins to fear that he is going mad.

Comment:

     Although the point of view becomes omniscient author at the end,
throughout most of the novel Golding stays in the mind of the central
character. As he follows his thoughts, at times he uses the stream of
consciousness technique to follow the chain of associations in Christopher's
mind. As he thinks of life on the ship and of the commander asking him about
his profession, he is reminded of his conversation with the producer's wife.
Rather than follow a logical order, Golding recreates the thoughts of his
protagonist as they are tied together in memory.

     It is appropriate that Chris should be an actor. He has played many parts
before, and now he is acting a life that does not exist. Though dead, he is
forced to go through the pretense of living-even to building a seaweed cross
to mark his place of death, his Golgotha. His cross represents intellectual
ingenuity alone, not spiritual or moral insight. The reason he loathes the
lobster is that it suggests this lack. The lobster and he are on the same
level of existence. With "both hands out to grab," he is like a clawing
primordial creature with greed his overriding drive.

Character Analyses:

     Peter - a weak character, a drunkard. Christopher's producer.

     Helen - Peter's wife, cheap in language and manner. Christopher's
mistress.

     George - the director who works with Christopher and Peter.

Chapters 9 and 10

     As if trying to recover his identity, Christopher is searching in the
pool for his reflection. Feverish from food poisoning, his delirium increases
and he hears again a drunken speech by Pete, his director, comparing him to
a maggot eating other maggots. A lick of summer lightning reminds him of a
similar flash shining across the face of Mary (later the wife of Nat) as he
attempted to seduce her in his car. He recalls, as a boy, smashing the bicycle
of Peter because it was better than his. He thinks back to his attempts to
escape the draft, and how his producer, Peter, and director, George, refused
to support his deferment. Even Helen, his mistress, refused to help him
because she had found out about his other women.

Comment:

     The things that caught up with Christopher in civilian life are
catching up now. That he cannot see his reflection in the water is possibly
related to the folk tradition in which a ghost, or vampire, or similar deathly
apparition leaves no reflection in a mirror. The lobsters that crawl nearby
are mirror enough for him. They suggest that he is a creature who grabs,
without consciousness of wrongdoing, whatever morsels come within his reach.
As his thoughts run again and again to the same scenes-his betrayal of others
and their betrayal of him-he begins to see himself as a creature of prey like
an enormous maggot who has fed on all of the other maggots locked in a tin
box. Pete had given him a description of this process of preparing a Chinese
delicacy. The maggots within maggots are, of course, like the other images of
teeth within teeth, Chinese boxes, receding mirrors, and large and small
shellfish. At the end of Chapter 10, Christopher unconsciously identifies
himself with the superior maggot who eats all of the others when he asserts,
"I'll live if I have to eat everything else on this bloody box!"

Character Analysis

     Mary-beautiful and strong-willed, elegant but tough.

Chapters 11 and 12

     A terrible despair is seizing the lone man as he thinks of his illness
and solitude. A gull that flashes by is, to his distraught eyes, a "flying
lizard." Eventually, he gets the poison out of his system by filling his
lifebelt with water and using it as an enema. But his feeling of triumph gives
way to further hallucination as he see a red lobster swimming in the sea. He
awakens from a fit to find his pants torn and bloody and his head bruised.
Rain comes, and then lightning that shears off a slice of rock and leaves a
black scar, reminding him of the "black lightning" predicted by Nat.

Comment:

     At the end of Chapter 12, Christopher is trying to convince himself that
he is mad. He would prefer insanity to the awful realization that this rock is
his appropriate hell, the logical outcome of the crimes he has committed.
Even when he tries to avoid blame, however, he makes allusions to his guilt.
For example, when he refers to the gull as a "lizard," and when he blames his
despair on his poisoned colon, "the serpent . . . coiled in my own body," he
is calling up a traditional image of evil, the serpent, Satan, existing in
Christopher as he did in the boys in Lord of the Flies. Further, since the
serpent is a conventional symbol for the id, the source of man's primitive
urges, according to Freud, especially the sexual urge, it is a fitting
reminder of his dissolute past. Christopher Martin's id has run berserk. And
now he must pay for his previous failure to coordinate activities of mind and
body, by the complete loss of association between mind and body. Madness is
preferable to the cool light of reason. Madness, he realizes, is an escape
from responsibility and the black lighting. So, an actor to the end, he
mimics the mad scenes from Shakespeare's King Lear.

Chapter 13 and 14

     The storm continues, and Chris, in his raving, persists in trying to
shout it down. The Dwarf is blown over and he imagines he sees in its place an
old woman, and then the old woman becomes God, asking him if he has had
enough. He shouts that he prefers the torture of endurance to submission to
the black lightning. Finally, as he rants and raves, lightning strikes the
rock, completing the destruction of the protagonist.

[See The Stone Dwarf: The dwarf if blown over during a storm.]

     In the final chapter, a British officer lands on an island in the
Hebrides to claim a body, which turns out to be that of Christopher Martin.
The body has been thrown up on shore. When the Scotsman who inhabits the
bsland asks the officer whether there is any surviving for someone like
Christopher, the officer takes him to be asking about the suffering of the
victim, and he assures him that there was not much surviving. "You saw the
body. He didn't even have time to kick off his seaboots."

Comment:

     While Chris is having his shouting battle with God, he claims to have
created this God, and also to be able to create his own heaven. "You have
created it," answers God, implying that the island rock is a heaven (or hell)
of Christophers's own making. We learn conclusively that the island is a
representation of an afterlife with the announcement that Chris did not remove
his seaboots. The entire experience on the island has been a dream of a
drowning man, an extension of his human life beyond the actual, as a
punishment for his graspingness, in the same way that the characters in
Dante's Inferno are punished by being forced to recreate, symbolically, their
human sins in their own private chamber of hell.

     What Mr. Campbell, the islander, wants from Officer Davidson is some word
from an expert on the possibility of an afterlife. The answer is doubly false,
because Chris has not only endured, he has endured beyond the present life
into an eternity of damnation. The whole experience of Christopher in the
novel reasserts the actuality of hell. Golding has written one episode more to
be tacked on the end of Dante's Inferno.

     It is appropriate that the lightning which terminates Christopher's
experiences on the rock is compared to a claw of a lobster. He has made his
hell and his God out of his own lobsterlike instincts, and those instincts
ultimately exterminate him. The penalty for a man who lives for himself
without using reason to control his vicious tendencies, and without using
reason to orient himself to his fellow man, is complete obliteration.

Character Analyses

     Christopher Martin: A man of great tenacity but little morality. His
philosophy of life is eat or be eaten. He uses his good looks and ingenuity to
further his own selfish egotistical aims. The only affection he has ever felt
is for his friend Nat. Nevertheless, at one point, he contemplates killing Nat
out of jealousy. His civilian profession is acting.

     Nathaniel Walterson: A religious prophet not unlike Simon in Lord of the
Flies. He is a friend of Christopher's solicitous for his spiritual
well-being, generous and warmhearted. He marries Mary, the one girl who
withstands the seductive charm of Christopher.

     Mary: Beautiful and strong-willed, she chooses Nat over Christopher. She
is a complex person, with elegance and refinement combined with toughness of
speech and moral fibre.

     Helen: Fat and white and crude, the producer's wife who Christopher
seduces.

     Peter: A childhood friend and later his producer. Frequently, when he is
drunk, he makes vicious verbal attacks on Christopher.

     George: A director of plays.

     Mr. Davidson: A captain in the English Navy who is responsible for
recovering the body of Christopher.

     Mr. Campbell: The Scotish islander who first finds Christopher's body.