Paper Details

Name: Rajeev Chandra Prasad Visala
Country: India

Year: 2025
Volume: Vol-12, issue-2, (July-December)
Page Number: 25-29
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17826534

ABSTRACT
William Golding's fiction, steeped in the psychological residues of World War II, offers a
profound psychoanalytic terrain for exploring the split subject, a fragmented psyche riven by
anxiety and guilt, leading to the shattered self. This paper conducts a Lacanian and Freudian
inquiry into this motif across three canonical novels: Lord of the Flies (1954), Pincher Martin
(1956), and Free Fall (1959). In Lord of the Flies, the boys' island exile manifests Freudian
id-superego antagonism, engendering collective anxiety and guilt that splinters communal
identity into savage shards. Pincher Martin internalises this fracture through the protagonist's
traumatic solipsism, where Lacanian symbolic failure amplifies existential guilt, culminating
in egoic annihilation. Free Fall extends the analysis to historical complicity, portraying the
artist's moral vertigo as a guilt-ridden descent that shatters illusory self-coherence. Drawing
on trauma theory and object relations, this study elucidates Golding's portrayal of the split
subject as an ethical imperative: anxiety and guilt, though disintegrative, compel
reconstructive self-awareness. Golding's narratives thus diagnose modernity's psychic
malaise, advocating psychoanalytic vigilance to mend the self's irreparable fissures.
Keywords: William Golding, split subject, psychoanalytic inquiry, anxiety and guilt,
shattered self, Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin