Analysis Of William Golding's Pincher Martin

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Pincher Martin, first published in 1956, is perhaps the most complex of all Golding's works. Generally described as a modern classic, the novel is the assertion of the self at all costs. It deals with the predicament of a modern godless man who finds himself entangled between his supreme pride, his reason, his intelligence, his confidence, and his desire for domination and power. When Golding started writing, there was an atmosphere of disillusion and disenchantment, and it was this that spurred him into writing and inspired most of his novels. The horrid experiences of the war shook his faith in humanity and left a deep scar on his psyche. The war had broken out when he was still struggling to establish himself. A sense of estrangement and meaninglessness prevailed everywhere. That is why Golding's fiction is essentially concerned with the predicament of the modern man, and in his novels, he has rendered, in detail, an analysis of the human conflicts which emanate from …show more content…
in the year 1957, the novel depicts the struggle for survival of a shipwrecked sailor. It is the story of an egotistical man who is already dead. Golding takes for his protagonist Christopher Hadley Martin who becomes Pincher Martin later. The title of the novel evokes Pincher's devilish ego, his pride, and greed with which he pinches men, women and boys. Pincher is also a common name for the sailors. So we see the protagonist Pincher Martin as a shipwrecked sailor who is blown off the bridge of a torpedoed destroyer into the swirling waters of the Atlantic during the World War II. He is a naval lieutenant whose wartime destroyer is torpedoed by the enemy in mid-Atlantic as a result of which he is blown off the bridge of the ship. He is the sole survivor in the tragic mishap and manages to stay afloat by inflating his lifebelt. He kicks off his sea boots and eventually reaches a large barren rock called

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