《蝇王》的原型解读

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浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

III

摘要

本文旨在运用弗莱和荣格的原型批评理论阐释《蝇王》中的原型特征及其内涵。根

据弗莱对原型的定义，原型是在文学中重复出现的意象。这些重复出现的意象将不同的

文学作品联系起来构成一个整体，从而形成一种文学传统，为后来的作家带来创作素材

与灵感并影响着文学整体的发展。笔者认为在《蝇王》中，戈尔丁自觉或者不自觉地从

西方文学的两大源头，即古希腊神话和圣经，提取意象并运用到《蝇王》的创作中。

本文试图通过建立《蝇王》中的原型体系，从文学和心理两个层面来阐释《蝇王》

中所出现的原型意象和其之所以出现的原因，从而更深层次地揭示戈尔丁对人性的反思。

从文学层面分析，本文认为是西方文学传统促使了《蝇王》的诞生，即弗莱所说的文学

产生文学。基于对《蝇王》中乌托邦性质的探究和对原罪理论的阐释，通过古希腊神话

和《圣经》，本文力图展现《蝇王》中所出现的原型人物，从而探寻《蝇王》中的原型主

题，以及“文学产生文学”在《蝇王》中的体现。从心理层面分析，本文试图通过荣格

的原型理论，即原型是集体无意识的表现，来阐释原型出现的原因。原型的出现并不是

无来由的，而是人类集体无意识的诉求，当外部的刺激激活了人类的集体无意识，那么

无意识就会通地各种渠道表现出来。

关键词：原型主题；原型人物；人性；文学传统；《蝇王》

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

Contents

Introduction...........................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1 Literature Review ....................................................................................4

1.1. Studies on Lord of the Flies Abroad ............................................................... 4

1.2 Studies on Lord of the Flies at Home............................................................... 6

Chapter Two The development of the Archetype Theory ......................................9

2.1 The Archetype Theory of James G. Frazer....................................................... 9

2.2 The Theory of Carl Jung................................................................................ 10

2.3 The Theory of Northrop Frye......................................................................... 11

2.4 The Archetype Theory and Lord of the Flies................................................. 14

Chapter Three The Archetypal Themes.................................................................16

3.1 The Archetypal Theme of Utopia................................................................... 16

3.2 The Archetypal Theme of Original Sin.......................................................... 25

Chapter Four The Archetypal Characters.............................................................32

4.1The Struggle between Rationality and the Tendency to Fall .......................... 32

4.2 Piggy-the Wise Fool....................................................................................... 40

4.3 Simon-the Scapegoat ..................................................................................... 46

Chapter Five The Reason for the Existence of Archetypes ..................................51

Conclusion....................................................................................................................55

Bibliography ................................................................................................................57

Appendix.......................................................................................................................................60

Acknowledgements......................................................................................................61

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

Introduction

Lord of the Flies is the masterpiece of English writer William Golding.

Published in 1954, the book has reached tens of millions of readers. The popularity

that this book wins would only be granted to adventure stories, light readings and

children's books. The book itself may be the most international taught of

twentieth-century novels. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Golding. I had to do

Lord of the Flies at school.” remarked King Carl Gustaf XXI of Sweden on presenting

the esteemed literary award in the 1983 Nobel ceremonies (Tiger, 1976:23). Like

Gulliver’s travels, this book at the first sight is a children’s adventure story. But with a

second thought, this book presented itself as a good material with a deep stratum of

complication and ambiguity for scholars to interpret from different angles. “Lord of

the Flies is undeniably a text that, however superficially simple, invites, indeed

compels, its reader to seek some deeper explanation, some secret significance, conceal

beneath the overt events of its story.” (Reilly, 1992:13) This simple book is cleverly

coded just like a bare skeleton covered with a richly varied and spicy flesh of colorful

characters and surprising events. This book has been read as a moral fable of personal

disintegration, as a social fable of communal regression, as a religious fable of the fall

of man. Golding has a keen insight and sharp pen when he wants to show the power

of evil in human beings. The charm of this book lies in the exciting story and the

profound meaning.

William Golding was born in Cornwall, on the southwestern tip of England. He

was educated at Marlborough Grammar School in the 1920s. His father, who was a

school master and believed in science, sent him to Oxford University, hoping his son

would follow his suit and become a scientist. But after two years, Golding found he

could not stand the subject of science and changed his major to English literature. He

wrote some collections of poems when he was an undergraduate though only a few of

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

them drew the attention of the publisher. When he graduated, he became a

schoolmaster like his father. During World WarⅡ, he served in the British Royal

Navy and fought bravely. After war, Golding returned to teaching and started writing

novels. His first novel Lord of the Flies was an immediate success. It was followed by

The Inheritors (1955), Princher Martin (1956), Free Will (1959), The Spire (1964)

and other novels.

Golding is a creative writer whose novel often conveys the various symbols and

meanings. In the narration of the modern allegory, he reveals the evil of human beings

and discusses the morality of the society. Golding is good at displaying man’s

paradoxical psychological process of longing for virtue and at the same time for evil

by setting his novel in certain circumstances. Lord of the Flies tests western culture by

transplanting it to an exotic locale where it prospers or withers depending on its

intrinsic durability and strength.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983 was awarded to William Golding for his

novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and

universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today.

Lord of the Flies tells about the fate of a group of English schoolboys who are

marooned and become isolated on an island, which is an allegory about the tragedy of

human nature. An aero plane carrying a number of schoolboys, as evacuees from

wartime air raid, crashes on a desert island. All the adults with the pilot are washed

out by waves to sea. These boys attempt to set up a normal society on the island.

Ralph, who represents social order and civilization, and a bespectacled fat, clumsy

boy, nicknamed Piggy, who represents reason and logical thought, find a conch shell

and use it as a trumpet to summon others together. A meeting of all the boys elects

Ralph to be the leader. Ralph appoints some to build shelters, and others to make a

fire, the smoke from which is their only signal to attract a passing ship to rescue them.

Jack, leader of a choir-school group in uniform, and his party are to act as hunters of

the wild pigs in the jungle, to provide meat. The fat boy’s spectacles, used as a

burning glass, are the sole means of igniting a fire. But soon, slackness delays work

on the shelters, the fire is not properly kept, and a nightmare of a younger boy starts a

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

panic fear of a beast from the sea. A general breakdown of morale develops when the

rule of law and order under Ralph’s leadership is undermined by Jack, whose ability

to hunt and kill pig lures more and more boys to his side. Jack makes a fly-infested

pig’s head struck on a pole and worships it with his fellows as the Lord of the Flies.

They paint their bodies with colored earths, and indulged in primitive barbarous

dances around slain pigs. Then Simon, a solitary, Christ-like boy, is killed as the beast

from the sea by them in their frenzy of superstition, to be offered as a sacrifice to the

Lord of the Flies. Jack wholly degenerates into a bloody-thirsty dictator. Most of the

boys, following his example, quickly become savages. They rob Piggy of his

spectacles and kill him. Ralph remains to be the last object of their hunting and

slaughter. But he is saved by the arrival of some officers in a naval ship, who take

charge of the children. Then a mask of civilization returns to these schoolboys.

Lord of the Flies, the Robinson Crusoe of our time, still enjoys-like the earlier

story of shipwreck and survival-a preeminent place in the cultural climate of the west.

Both cultural document and modern classic, the novel continues to provoke critical

attention at the same time as it continues to promote great general interest; over the

past fifty years it has sold countless millions of copies.

This book Lord of the Flies, like its author，has been endlessly discussed,

analyzed, dissected, over-praised and over-faulted. In fact, Golding’s first book is not

nearly as long as the critical commentary it has spawned, with Golding himself

contributing in no small degree to the phenomenon he once laconically described

himself as having become: “the raw material of an academic light industry”; “the

books that has been written about my books have made a status of me.”(Golding,

1982:169)

Packet of pamphlets and articles on source, genre, meaning, archetype, and

symbolism attend to interpret Lord of the Flies from various angles and thus attribute

to foster as well sustain this book’s reputation.

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

Chapter 1 Literature Review

1.1. Studies on Lord of the Flies Abroad

The studies on Lord of the Flies overseas are not encouraging in recent years.

There are only a few essays on this novel in JSTOR as well as in SSCI and A&HCI. It

seems that Lord of the Flies, despite winning the Nobel Prize, does not attract too

much attention from the scholars in recent years. The essays and books available

show the studies on Lord of the Flies mainly focus on the following aspects.

The first is the eternal theme of human nature---the original sin or the defect of

human nature. In S.J Boyd's essay (2008) “The Nature of the Beast”, he makes a

comparisons between King Lear and Lord of the Flies to show the loss of innocence

of children and draws a conclusion that in our human nature there is a terrifying

propensity towards wanton cruelty which is evident in children. Marijike Van Vuuren

(2004) in his essay “Good Grief: Lord of the Flies as a Post-war Rewriting of

Salvation History” points out that this novel depicts the original sin and the problem

of evil. Virginia Tiger, early in 1976, in her book William Golding the Unmoved

Target, has already found that one of Golding’s great achievements is his effort to

depict the original sin and the defect of human nature. Howard S. Babb in his book

Golding’s Novel also discusses this theme.

The second is to treat Lord of the Flies as a fable or allegory with the focus still

on the defect of human nature, but from a different research approach. Early in 1963,

only nine years after the publication of Lord of the Flies, Water Sullivan in his book

Arts and Letters wrote a chapter titled “ William Golding: the Fables and the Art”, in

which he introduced Golding as a fabulist and made an effort to reveal how Golding

creates a fable out of the current world. J.D. O’Hara (1966) writes “Mute Choirboys

and Angelic Pigs: the Fable in Lord of the Flies”, in which he finds out the meanings

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文

of the symbols and by so doing, O'Hara reverses part of Golding’s moral stand: the

fable has become a defense of the society rather than an attack on it.

L.L.Dickson(2008) in his essay “Lord of the Flies” analyzes the elements as contained

in this novel which form the fable.

The third is to dig out the symbolic meanings of this novel like Jerome

Martin's(1969) essay “Symbol Hunting Golding’s Lord of the Flies” in which he

reveals the symbolic meanings of the names: Ralph, Piggy, Jack, Roger, Sam and Eric;

of events: taking names, blowing the conch, hunting pigs and being saved; of items:

glasses, conch, black cloaks, knife, the island, the creepers, fire, castle rock, pig,

smoke, the Lord of the Flies, butterfly and the sea.

The fourth is conducted from a political aspect. David Spitz (1970) in his essay

“Power and Authority: An Interpretation of Golding’s Lord of the Flies” discusses

how to bring power and authority together in the name of justice. The society can not

survive without force but force can also be dangerous, so David indicates that only

when human beings believe in the ideal, the good things and realize that evil is part of

human nature and society can they attain an ideal society or an approximated one.

Stefan Hawlin(2008) in the essay “The Savage in the Forest: Decolonizing William

Golding” applies post-colonialism to the work. He holds that this novel is defensive

about the surrender of Empire, and makes an attempt to restate the old Empire

misrepresentation of white enlightenment and black savagery.

Up till now, no essays or books can be found that are fully related to the theory

of archetype. Patrick Reilly in his book Lord of the Flies: Father and Sons (1992)

does realize the heritage that William Golding gets from the tradition of western

literature. In his book he compares the book Lord of the Flies with Gulliver’s travels

and the Brother Karamazov in order to find the common feature they share. Patrick

Reilly also mentions several writers’ works to show the literary tradition. In seems

that he has acknowledged that Lord of the Flies is a part of the western literary

tradition. But the depressing point is that he gives no attention to the role of archetype.

The other scholars do mention Lord of the Flies’ relation with the great literary

tradition. Lawrence S. Friedman (2008) in his essay “Grief, Grief, Grief: Lord of the

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摘要：

浙江财经学院硕士学位论文III摘要本文旨在运用弗莱和荣格的原型批评理论阐释《蝇王》中的原型特征及其内涵。根据弗莱对原型的定义，原型是在文学中重复出现的意象。这些重复出现的意象将不同的文学作品联系起来构成一个整体，从而形成一种文学传统，为后来的作家带来创作素材与灵感并影响着文学整体的发展。笔者认为在《蝇王》中，戈尔丁自觉或者不自觉地从西方文学的两大源头，即古希腊神话和圣经，提取意象并运用到《蝇王》的创作中。本文试图通过建立《蝇王》中的原型体系，从文学和心理两个层面来阐释《蝇王》中所出现的原型意象和其之所以出现的原因，从而更深层次地揭示戈尔丁对人性的反思。从文学层面分析，本文认为是西方文学传统促使...

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