Colegiul National "Elena Ghiba-birta" Arad

Lucrare pentru obtinerea certificatului de competenta

Lingvistica la limba engleza

Nobel Prizes in Literature

Profesor coordonator
Camelia Sasu Candidat
Mariana Rac
XII E
 2008

Table of contents

Introduction………………………….3
II John Steinbeck……………………..4
III Ernest Hemingway………………..14
IV Thomas Stearns Elliot…………….23
V William Golding……………………35
Précis…………………………………..
Bibliography……………………..........

2
 Introduction

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women from all corners of the
globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in
peace. The foundations for the prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will,
leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the Nobel Prize. Literature has always been
a priceless part in the world’s cultural background. Thousands of writers influenced many
generations, in the manner in which every single person felt a strong connection with one or
more characters from literature. This idea is the base of my paper.

I have chosen this topic because I wanted to point out the importance of knowing the most
valuable writers from the British and American literature. Another reason for choosing this
topic is the fact that quite few graduates decide to write about it in their similar papers. Besides
this aspect, another powerful impulse towards writing about this subject, was my pleasure of
reading good books. This habit of reading valuable literature was a consequence of having
great teachers who tought us how to appreciate a good book.

The Nobel Prize is the greatest appreciation which a scientist or a writer can get in a
lifetime dedicated to their career. The British and American Writers , Nobel awarded that I
have chosen, are, undoubtely great values, great intelectuals who managed to impress millions
of people through their literary masterpieces.

The literary Nobel Prizes were not given enough attention, as it was given to the Nobel
Prizes for science and this is why I tought it would be important to write about them.

3
 John Steinbeck - The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962
“For his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and
keen social perception”

4
Biography

5
 John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, came from a family of moderate
means. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. In
1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance
writer, but he failed and returned to California. After publishing some novels and short stories,
Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories
about Monterey paisanos.

Steinbeck’s novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of
rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not
always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy humour
of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to
In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on
California plantations. This was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), the story of the
imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volume The Long
Valley (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work, The Grapes of Wrath,
the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, moved to
California where they became migratory workers.

Among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our
Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote
about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American
states. He died in New York City in 1968.

Banquet speech

I thank the Swedish Academy for finding my work worthy of this highest honor.In my
heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold
in respect and reverence - but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for
myself.It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on
the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be
well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

6
 Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled,
not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my
profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.Literature
was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in
empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie
despair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed
except to become more needed.The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and
exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been
decreed by our species.

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great
predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so
long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in
conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of
human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the
resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with
exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and
dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.Furthermore, the writer is delegated to
declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry
in defeat - for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair,
these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.I hold that a writer who does not
passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in
literature.The present universal fear has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledge
and manipulation of certain dangerous factors in the physical world.

It is true that other phases of understanding have not yet caught up with this great step, but
there is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast. Indeed it is a part of the

7
writer’s responsibility to make sure that they do.With humanity’s long proud history of
standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and
extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest
potential victory.Understandably, I have been reading the life of Alfred Nobel - a solitary man,
the books say, a thoughtful man. He perfected the release of explosive forces, capable of
creative good or of destructive evil, but lacking choice, ungoverned by conscience or
judgment.

Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may even have
foreseen the end result of his probing - access to ultimate violence - to final destruction. Some
say that he became cynical, but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a control, a
safety valve. I think he found it finally only in the human mind and the human spirit. To me,
his thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these awards.They are offered for
increased and continuing knowledge of man and of his world - for understanding and
communication, which are the functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstrations
of the capacity for peace - the culmination of all the others.Less than fifty years after his death,
the door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice.We have
usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.Fearful and unprepared, we have
assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world - of all living things.

The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is
at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the
wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.Man himself has become our greatest hazard
and our only hope.So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is
the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.

Prior to the speech, R. Sandler, Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, commented:
«Mr. John Steinbeck - In your writings, crowned with popular success in many countries, you
have been a bold observer of human behaviour in both tragic and comic situations. This you
have described to the reading public of the entire world with vigour and realism. Your Travels
with Charley is not only a search for but also a revelation of America, as you yourself say:

8
‹This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future turns out to be the
macrocosm of microcosm me.› Thanks to your instinct for what is genuinely American you
stand out as a true representative of American life.»

Plot summary «The Grapes of Wrath»

The narrative begins from Tom Joad’s point of view just after he is paroled from prison
after serving four years for manslaughter. On his
journey home, he meets a preacher, Jim Casy, whom he
remembers from his childhood, and the two travel
together. When they arrive at Tom’s childhood farm
home, they find it deserted. Disconcerted, he and Casy
go to his Uncle John’s residence a few miles away,
where he finds his family loading a Hudson truck with
everything they own; he learns that his family’s crops
were destroyed in the Dust Bowl and that they were
forced to default on loans. With their farm repossessed,
the Joads seek solace in hope; hope inscribed on
handbills that are distributed everywhere in Oklahoma,
describing the beautiful country of California and high
pay to be found out west. The Joads, along with Jim Casy, are seduced by this façade and
invest everything they have into the journey. Although leaving Oklahoma would be breaking
parole, Tom decides that it is a risk, albeit minimal, that he has to take.

En route, they discover that the roads and highways are saturated with crowds of other
families making the same trek, ensnared by the same promise. As the Joads continue and hear
stories from others, some coming back from California, they are forced to confront the
possibility that their prospects may not be what they had hoped. This realization, supported by

9
the deaths of Grandpa and Grandma and the departure of Noah (the eldest Joad son) and
Connie (the husband of the pregnant Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon), is forced from their
thoughts: they must go on because they have no other choice.

Upon arrival, they find hordes of applicants for every job and little hope of finding a decent
wage, because of the oversupply of labor, lack of rights, and the collusion of the big corporate
farmers. The tragedy lies in the simplicity and impossibility of their dream: a house, a family,
and a steady job. A gleam of hope is presented by Weedpatch, the clean, warm camps operated
by the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that tried to help the migrants.
However, the benevolent bureaucrat Jim Rawley who manages the camp does not have enough
money and space to care for all of the needy.

In response to the exploitation of laborers, the workers begin to join unions. The surviving
members of the family unknowingly work on an orchard involved in a strike that eventually
turns violent, killing the preacher Casy and forcing Tom Joad to kill again and become a
fugitive. He bids farewell to his mother, promising that no matter where he runs, he will be a
tireless advocate for the oppressed. Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn; however, Ma Joad
remains steadfast and forces the family through the bereavement. In the end, Rose of Sharon
commits the only act in the book that is not futile: she breast feeds a starving man, still trying
to show hope in humanity after her own negative experience. This final act is said to illustrate
the spontaneous mutual sharing that will lead to a new awareness of collective values.

Title

Steinbeck had unusual difficulty devising a title for his novel. “The Grapes of Wrath”,
suggested by his wife, Carol Steinbeck, was deemed more suitable than anything the author
could come up with. The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Julia Ward
Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

10
Ernest Hemingway-The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954
“for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and
the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”

11
 Biography

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer
in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered
the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the
front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable
time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and
American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek
Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans
in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally
successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer’s
disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a
reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel,
The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and
lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters -
tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of
modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose,
his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his
short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

Banquet Speech

As the Laureate was unable to be present at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in
Stockholm, December 10, 1954, the speech was read by John C. Cabot, United States
Ambassador «Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any
domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel

12
for this Prize.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other
than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own
list according to his knowledge and his conscience.It would be impossible for me to ask the
Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are
in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this
sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of
alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s
loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his
loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good
enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where

he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should
always try for something that has never been done or that others
have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will
succeed.How simple the writing of literature would be if it were
only necessary to write in another way what has been well
written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past
that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not
speak it. Again I thank you.»

Prior to the speech, H.S. Nyberg, Member of the Swedish Academy, made the following
comment: «Another deep regret is that the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature,
Mr. Ernest Hemingway, on account of ill health has to be absent from our celebration. We
wish to express our admiration for the eagle eye with which he has observed, and for the
accuracy with which he has interpreted the human existence of our turbulent times; also for

13
the admirable restraint with which he has described their naked struggle. The human
problems which he has treated are relevant to all of us, living as we do in the confused
conditions of modern life; and few authors have exercised such a wide influence on
contemporary literature in all countries. It is our sincere hope that he will soon recover health
and strength in pursuit of his life-work.»

The Old man and the sea

Most biographers maintain that the years following Hemingway’s publication of For
Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 until 1952 were the bleakest in his literary career. The novel
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was almost unanimously disparaged by critics as
self-parody. Evidently his participation as an Allied correspondent in World War II did not
yield fruits equivalent to those wrought of his experiences in World War I (A Farewell to
Arms, 1929) or the Spanish Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago’s story, which became The Old Man
and the Sea, as part of a random intimacy between mother and son and also the fact of
relationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as “The Sea
Book.” Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream.
Positive feedback he received for On the Blue Water (Esquire, April 1936) led him to rewrite
it as an independent work. The book is a novella because it has no chapters or parts and is
slightly longer than a short story. He also referred to the Bible as the “Sea of Knowledge”
and other such things.

The novel first appeared, in its 26,500-word entirety, as part of the September 1, 1952
edition of Life magazine. 5.3 million copies of that issue were sold within two days. The
majority of concurrent criticism was positive, although some dissenting criticism has since
emerged. The title was misprinted on the cover of an early edition as The Old Man and the
Sea.

14
 Plot summary “The old man and the sea”

The Old Man and the Sea recounts an epic battle between an old, experienced fisherman
and a giant marlin said to be the largest catch of his life.

It opens by explaining that the fisherman, who is named Santiago (but only directly
referred to outside of dialogue as “the old man”), has gone 84 days without catching any fish
at all. He is apparently so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by
his parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen.
Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago’s shack each night, hauling
back his fishing gear, feeding him, and discussing American baseball—most notably
Santiago’s idol, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture
far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.

Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff far into the Gulf. He
sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait.
Unable to pull in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two days
and two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line
with his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a
compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother.

On the third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness to
the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strength
he has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, thereby
ending the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish.

Santiago straps the marlin to

his skiff and heads home, thinking

15
about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed.
However, the old man determines that because of the fish’s great dignity, no one will be
worthy of eating the marlin.

While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of
blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills with his
harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife
to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five sharks are slain and
many others are driven away. But by night, the sharks have devoured the marlin’s entire
carcass, leaving only its tail left. The old man castigates himself for sacrificing the marlin.
Finally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, he struggles on the way to his shack,
carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and enters a
very deep sleep.

Ignorant of the old man’s journey, a group of fishermen gathers the next day around the
boat where the fish’s skeleton is still attached. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it
for a shark. Manolin, worried during the old man’s endeavor, cries upon finding him safe
asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise
to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of lions on the African
beach.

Inspiration for character

While Hemingway was living in Cuba beginning in 1940 with his third wife Martha
Gellhorn, one of his favorite pastimes was to sail and fish in his
boat, named the Pilar. General biographical consensus holds
that the model for Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea was,
at least in part, the Cuban fisherman Gregorio Fuentes.

Fuentes, also known as Goyo to his friends, was born in

1897 on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, migrated to Cuba
when he was six years old and met Hemingway there in1928.
In the 1930s, Hemingway hired him to look after his boat.

16
During Hemingway’s Cuban years, a strong friendship formed between Hemingway and
Fuentes. For almost thirty years, Fuentes served as the captain of the Pilar; this included time
during which Hemingway did not live in Cuba. Fuentes at times would admit that the story
was not exactly about him. He related that the true inspiration of the old man and the boy did
exist but they never knew who they were. The story goes that in the late 1940s, upon return
from an early morning fishing trip, Fuentes and Hemingway saw a small rowboat 10 miles
out to sea. Hemingway asked Fuentes to approach the vessel to see if they needed help.
Inside the boat was an old man and a boy. As the vessels closed in the old man began yelling
at them with insults including telling them to go to hell, indicating that they had scared away
the fish. According to Fuentes, he and Hemingway looked at each other in surprise. Just the
same, Hemingway asked Fuentes to lower them some food and drinks while the old man and
boy glared at them. Without another word exchanged, the two boats parted ways. According
to Fuentes, Hemingway began immediately to write in his notebook and later asked him to
find the old man. According to Fuentes, he never was able to find the fisherman that had
made such an impression on Hemingway. Fuentes recounts that this was the real origin of the
lore. A few years after The Old Man and the Sea was published, residents of Cojimar
believed that the old fisherman that Fuentes and Hemingway ran into at sea was a humble
local fisherman they called el viejo Miguel; some described his physical appearance as a wiry
Spencer Tracy.

Fuentes, suffering from

cancer, died in 2002; he was
104 years old. Prior to his
death, he donated
Hemingway’s Pilar to the
Cuban government.

Symbols & Style

17
 In the past, hardly anyone ever suspected Hemingway novels of symbolism. Then, in The
Old Man and the Sea, people saw symbols—the old man stood for man’s dignity, the big
fish embodied nature, the sharks symbolized evil (or maybe just the critics).”No good book
has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says
Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all
right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make
a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good
and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something
really true and sometimes truer than true.”He looks ahead at some floating sargasso weed,
where some flying fishes are skittering through the air. “Could be fish there,” he says. A reel
gives out a soft whine, and Hemingway goes into action again. “Beautiful!” he cries.
“Dolphin. They’re beautiful.” After landing his fish, shimmering blue, gold and green,
Hemingway turns his attention to his guest. “Take him softly now,” he croons. “Easy. Easy.
Work him with style. That’s it, up slowly with the rod, now reel in fast. Suave. With style.
With style. Don’t break his mouth.” After the second fish at last flops onto the deck,
Hemingway continues his reflections. “The right way to do it—style—is not just an idle
concept,” he says. “It is simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done. The fact
that the right way also looks beautiful when it’s done is just incidental.”

This feeling about style, perhaps more than anything else, has always been Hemingway’s
credo—whether it concerned the right way to kill a bull, track a wildebeest, serve
Valpolicella or blow up a bridge. And it was usually the redeeming feature and ultimate
triumph of his characters: they might die, but they died with style. They left behind them
some aura of virtue, some defiant statement of this-is-the-way-it-should-be-done that
amounted to a victory of sorts.

Judgment & Pride

The matter of style reminds Hemingway of many things, including his Nobel Prize. He

18
knows just what he would like to say if he went to Stockholm for the acceptance ceremony.
He would like to talk about a half-forgotten poet and great stylist—Ezra Pound. Poet Pound
used to look over Hemingway’s early manuscripts in Paris and returned them, mercilessly
blue-penciled, the adjectives gone. Indicted for treason for his pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy
during World War II, Pound was declared “mentally incompetent” in 1946 and is now in
Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. “Ezra Pound is a great poet,” says Hemingway
fiercely, “and whatever he did he has been punished greatly and I believe should be freed to
go and write poems in Italy where he is loved and understood. He was the master of T. S.
Eliot. Eliot is a winner of the Nobel Prize. I believe it might well have gone to Pound . . . I
believe this would be a good year to release poets. There is a school of thought in America
which, if encouraged far enough, could well believe that a man should be punished for the
simple error against conformity of being a poet. Dante, by these standards, could well have
spent his life in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for errors of judgment and of pride.”Alongside the
Pilar, the bait keeps bobbing and Dante gives way to the dolphins. In little time the Pilar
boats 15 beauties. Excited as a boy, Hemingway overlooks a promise to quit early and take a
late-afternoon nap. Not until almost dusk does the boat put in to harbor. The sun seems to be
setting only a few yards off a corner of Havana, four miles distant, and Hemingway savors it
as if it were his first sunset—or his last. “Look!” he exclaims. “Now watch it go down, and
then you’ll see a big green ball where it was.” The sun falls as if jerked below the horizon,
and for a long instant a big, green, sun-sized ball hangs in its place.

As the Pilar turns the harbor mouth, Hemingway takes the controls. Ceremonially,
Gregorio the mate hands up to him what remains of the tequila and a fresh-cut half of lime.
Hemingway does not actually drink the tequila, and the whole thing bears the appearance of a
ritual, as if to ward off sea serpents. Only at the dock does he pass around the bottle. “We
went out and had a good day and caught plenty fish and got pooped,” he says. “Now we can
relax for a while and talk and go to sleep.” With a tired smile on his tired, grizzled face, he
lumbers up the gangway and off to his car and home”.

«A man can be destroyed but not defeated.»

Ernest Hemingway

19
Thomas Stearns Eliot - The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948
“For his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”

20
 Banquet Speech
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December
10, 1948

“When I began to think of what I should say to you this evening, I wished only to express
very simply my appreciation of the high honour which the Swedish Academy has thought fit
to confer upon me. But to do this adequately proved no simple task: my business is with
words, yet the words were beyond my command. Merely to indicate that I was aware of
having received the highest international honour that can be bestowed upon a man of letters,
would be only to say what everyone knows already. To profess my own unworthiness would
be to cast doubt upon the wisdom of the Academy; to praise the Academy might suggest that
I, as a literary critic, approved the recognition given to myself as a poet. May I therefore ask
that it be taken for granted, that I experienced, on learning of this award to myself, all the
normal emotions of exaltation and vanity that any human being might be expected to feel at
such a moment, with enjoyment of the flattery, and exasperation at the inconvenience, of
being turned overnight into a public figure? Were the Nobel Award similar in kind to any
other award, and merely higher in degree, I might still try to find words of appreciation: but
since it is different in kind from any other, the expression of one’s feelings calls for resources
which language cannot supply.

I must therefore try to express myself in an indirect way, by putting before you my own
interpretation of the significance of the Nobel Prize in Literature. If this were simply the
recognition of merit, or of the fact that an author’s reputation has passed the boundaries of
his own country and his own language, we could say that hardly any one of us at any time is,
more than others, worthy of being so distinguished. But I find in the Nobel Award something
more and something different from such recognition. It seems to me more the election of an
individual, chosen from time to time from one nation or another, and selected by something
like an act of grace, to fill a peculiar role and to become a peculiar symbol. A ceremony takes
place, by which a man is suddenly endowed with some function which he did not fill before.
So the question is not whether he was worthy to be so singled out, but whether he can

21
perform the function which you have assigned to him: the function of serving as a
representative, so far as any man can be of thing of far greater importance than the value of
what he himself has written.

Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture,
architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the
language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of
uniting them.

But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry
itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to
another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs,
an understanding we can get in no other way. We may think also of the history of poetry in
Europe, and of the great influence that the poetry of one language can exert on another; we
must remember the immense debt of every considerable poet to poets of other languages than
his own; we may reflect that the poetry of every country and every language would decline
and perish, were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues. When a poet speaks to his
own people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him are
speaking also. And at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets of other
languages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of the
spirit of his people, to their own. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly through
translation, which must be also a kind of recreation of his poems by other poets, partly
through readers of his language who are not themselves poets, the poet can contribute toward
understanding between peoples.

In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those who
inhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is a
meaning to the phrase «the poetry of Europe», and even to the word «poetry» the world over.
I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it be
apparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding of
each other which, however partial, is still essential. And I take the award of the Nobel Prize

22
in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be primarily an assertion of the supra-national
value of poetry. To make that affirmation, it is necessary from time to time to designate a
poet: and I stand before you, not on my own merits, but as a symbol, for a time, of the
significance of poetry.

Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish Academy made these remarks:
«Humility is also the characteristic which you, Mr. Eliot, have come to regard as man’s
virtue. ‹The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.› At first it did
not appear that this would be the final result of your visions and your acuity of thought. Born
in the Middle West, where the pioneer mentality was still alive, brought up in Boston, the
stronghold of Puritan tradition, you came to 9Europe in your youth and were there
confronted with the pre-war type of civilization in the Old World: the Europe of Edward VII,
Kaiser Wilhelm, the Third Republic, and The Merry Widow. This contact was a shock to you,
the expression of which you brought to perfection in The Waste Land, in which the confusion
and vulgarity of the civilization became the object of your scathing criticism. But beneath
that criticism there lay profound and painful disillusionment, and out of this disillusionment
there grew forth a feeling of sympathy, and out of that sympathy was born a growing urge to
rescue from the ruins of the confusion the fragments from which order and stability might be
restored. The position you have long held in modern literature provokes a comparison with
that occupied by Sigmund Freud, a quarter of a century earlier, within the field of psychic
medicine. If a comparison might be permitted, the novelty of the therapy which he introduced
with psychoanalysis would match the revolutionary form in which you have clothed your
message. But the path of comparison could be followed still further. For Freud the most
profound cause of the confusion lay in the Unbehagen in der Kultur of modern man. In his
opinion there must be sought a collective and individual balance, which should constantly
take into account man’s primitive instincts. You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite opinion. For
you the salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural tradition, which, in our more
mature years, lives with greater vigour within us than does primitiveness, and which we must
preserve if chaos is to be avoided. Tradition is not a dead load which we drag along with us,
and which in our youthful desire for freedom we seek to throw off. It is the soil in which the
seeds of coming harvests are to be sown, and from which future harvests will be garnered. As

23
a poet you have, Mr. Eliot, for decades, exercised a greater influence on your contemporaries
and younger fellow writers than perhaps anyone else of our time.”

Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis,

Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at
Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne,
Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England,
where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and
eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber,
of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the
seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the
exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot
became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.

Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Never
compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief
that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in
language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this
difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot’s poetry from
Prufrock (1917) to the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian writer:
the early work, especially The Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the expression of
that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. In Ash Wednesday (1930) and the
Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken
care not to become a «religious poet». and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious
force. However, his dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939)
are more openly Christian apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocates a
traditionalism in religion, society, and literature that seems at odds with his pioneer activity
as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older
man than the poet of The Waste Land, it should not be forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a

24
living organism comprising past and present in constant mutual interaction. Eliot’s plays
Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The
Confidential Clerk (1954), and TheElderStatesman(1959) were published in one volume in
1962; Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in 1963.

About T.S.Elliot’s work

“When I wrote a poem called The Waste land”, T.S.Elliot noted in 1931, “ some of the
approving critics said that I had expressed the “ dissilusionment of a generation”, which is
nonsense.” “ I may” he continued, “have expresed for them their own illusion of being
disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot, the most
important and influential English poet of his own and of the two subsequent generations, did
not write The Waste Land(1922) as an Englishman. He was like his friend and early mentor
Ezra Pound (“il miglior fabbro” , “the better craftsman”, of the dedication to The Wasted
Land), an American resident in London.

If the body of Eliot’s work can be claimed as much for “ English” as for “American”
literature it is because of the distinctively cisatlantic pointing that marks it ( in his essay on
William Blake, for example, he adresses his “fellow” English readers). Although much of his
topography, vocabulary, and awareness of public history and culture are self-conscciously
British, Eliot’s literary roots were cosmopolitan. As a student at Harvard between 1906 and
1914 he had become aquainted with an eclectic range of philosophical, historical, and literary
scolarship. In Paris in 1911 he attended lectures by Henry Bergson, practised French
conversation with Henri Alain-Fournier, ande encountered the monarchist Catholic
journalism of Charles Maurras. At Harvard in 1908 he had been sufficiently fired by Arthur
Symons’s account of recent French poetry in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).
To send off to Paris for the poems of Jules Laforgue(1860-87). Through Laforgue he had
discovered the attractions of a reticent, ironic, clever, and referential poetry, a poetry often
cast in the form of free verse dramatic monologues in which a wry persona express himself
rather than acts out the private emotions of his creator. The influence of the brittle Laforgue,

25
though crucial in moulding Eliot’s early style, was transient; that of Baudelaire and Dante
proved more lasting and more haunting. Baudelaire remained for him the great inventor of a
modern poetry because his verse and language seemed “the nearest thing to a complete
renovation that we have experienced”. In Dante, by contrast, he found a medieval spiritual
and a poetic authority which seemed to him to adress the modern condition directly.

The Waste Land

“APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
The Waste Land does not merely reflect the breakdown of an historical, social, and
cultural order battered by violent forces operating under the name of modernity. For Eliot the
disaster that characterized modernity was not an overturning, but the unavoidable, and ironic,
culmination of that very order so lovingly celebrated in Victoria’s last decade on the throne.
Unlike the older generation, who saw in events like the Great War the passing of a golden
age, Eliot saw only that the golden age was itself a heap of absurd sociopolitical axioms and
perverse misreadings of the cultural past that had proved in the last instance to be made of
the meanest alloy. The poem’s enactment of the contemporary social scene in “The Burial of
the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” and “The Fire Sermon” exhibits the “negative liberal
society” in which such events and people are typical. Eliot’s choice of these events and
people—Madame Sosostris, the cast of characters in “A Game of Chess,” and the typist—as
representative of a particular society is susceptible, of course, to a political analysis, which is
to say, their representativeness is not self-evident, though they are presented as if it is. The
“one bold stare” of the house-agent’s clerk, put back in the bourgeois context where staring is
one of the major lapses in manners, does not hold up the mirror to a simple gesture, but
illuminates the underlying conditions that make a mere clerk’s swagger possible. What is
exposed is the “fact” that clerks in general no longer know their place. What we are to make

26
of this fact is pointedly signaled by the disgust that the specifics of the rendering provoke and
the social distance generated by the Tiresian foresufferance. . . .
As its social critique was aimed negatively at the liberal ethos which Eliot felt had
culminated in the War and its disorderly aftermath, The Waste Land could not visibly adopt
some preliberal code of values. In the same way, the poem could not propose a postliberal,
historicist or materialist ethic without an historicizing epistemology. The poem’s authority
rested instead on other bases that provided, not a system of ideas as the primary form of
legitimation, but a new lyric synthesis as a kind of experiential authenticity in a world in
which the sacred cosmologies, on the one hand, had fallen prey to astrologers and charlatans,
while, on the other, the cosmology of everyday life, i.e. the financial system (the “City” in
the poem), had fallen into the soiled hands of racially indeterminate and shady importers of
currants and the like, among them, of course, the pushing Jews of the plunderbund. . . .
The poem attempts to penetrate below the level of rationalist consciousness, where the
conceptual currencies of the liberal ethos have no formative and directive power. Below that
level lay the real story about human nature, which “liberal thought” perversely worked to
obscure, by obscuring the intersection of the human and the divine at the deepest levels of
consciousness. That stratum did not respond to the small-scale and portable logics of
Enlightenment scientism, but
to the special “rationality” of
mythic thought. Its “logic”
and narrative forms furnish
the idiom of subrationalist,
conscious life. To repeat: if
not on the conventional
rationalist basis, where does
Eliot locate the authority of
The Waste Land, and
authority that can save the
poem from mere eccentric
sputter and give it a more commanding aspect? I think it was important for Eliot himself to
feel the poem’s command, and not simply to make it convincing to skeptical readers; Lyndall

27
Gordon’s biography makes this inner need for strength in his own convictions a central
theme in Eliot’s early life. But to answer our question: the authority the poem claims has two
dimensions.
The first is based on the aesthetics of French symbolisme and its extension into the
Wagnerian music-drama. Indeed the theoretical affinites of Baudelaire et al. and Wagner,
which Eliot obviously intuited in the making of The Waste Land, can be seen now as nothing
short of brilliant. Only in our own time are these important aesthetic and cultural connections
being seriously explored. From symbolisme Eliot adopted the notion of the epistemological
self-sufficiency of aesthetic consciousness, its independence from rationalist instrumentality,
and thus its more efficacious contact with experience and, at the deeper levels, contact with
the divine through its earthly language in myth. From his French and German forebears, Eliot
formulated a new discourse of experience which in the 1920s was still very much the voice
of the contemporary avant-garde in Britain and, in that sense, a voice on the margins, without
institutional authority. But here the ironic, even sneering, dismissal of the liberal stewardship
of culture and society reverses the semiotics of authority-claims by giving to the voice on the
margins an authority the institutional voices can no longer assume since the world they are
meant to sustain has finally been seen through in all those concrete ways the poem
mercilessly enacts. The Waste Land is quite clear on that point. We are meant to see in “The
Fire Sermon,” for example, the “loitering heirs of City directors” weakly giving way to the
hated métèques, so that the City, one of the “holy” places of mercantilism, has fallen to
profane hands, The biting humor in this is inescapable. . . .
The second dimension of the authority on which The Waste Land rests involves the new
discourse on myth that comes from the revolutionary advances in anthropology in Eliot’s
time associated with the names of Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and the Cambridge
School led by Sir James Frazer and Jane Harrison. We know that Eliot was well acquainted
with these developments at least as early as 1913-14. The importance of these new ideas
involved rethinking the study of ancient and primitive societies. The impact of these
renovations was swift and profound and corresponds, though much less publicly, to the
impact of On the Origin of Species on the educated public of midcentury Victorian life.
Modernist interest in primitive forms of art (Picasso, Lawrence, and many others), and,
therefore, the idioms and structures of thought and feeling in primitive cultures, makes sense

28
in several ways. Clearly the artistic practices of primitive peoples are interesting technically
to other artists of any era. Interest in the affective world or the collective mentality of a
primitive society is another question altogether. That interest, neutral, perhaps, in
scholarship, becomes very easy to formulate as a critique of practices and structures in the
present that one wants to represent as distortions and caricatures of some original state of
nature from which modernity has catastrophically departed. Eliot’s interest in the mythic
thought of primitive cultures, beginning at Harvard, perhaps in the spirit of scientific inquiry,
takes a different form in the argument of The Waste Land. There it functions pointedly as a
negative critique of the liberal account of the origins of society in the institutions of contract,
abstract political and civil rights, and mechanistic psychology.
The anthropologists rescued the
major cultural production of primitive
societies—myth—from the view that
saw these ancient narratives either as
the quaint decorative brio of simple
folk or, if they were Greek, as the
narrative mirrors of heroic society.
Instead myth, and not just the myths of
the Greeks, was reconceived as the narrative thematics of prerationalist cosmologies that
provided an account of the relationship between the human and the divine. Myth was also
interpreted psychologically, and Nietzsche is crucial in this development, as making visible
the deeper strata of the mind. If the concept is the notional idiom of reason, myth is the
language of unconscious life. What Eliot intuited from this new understanding was that myth
provided a totalizing structure that could make sense, equally, of the state of a whole culture
and of the whole structure of an individual mind (Notes 25). In this intuition he found the
idiom of an elaborated, universalizing code which was not entirely the product of rationalist
thought. In addition, this totalizing structure preserved the sacred dimension of life by seeing
it inextricably entwined with the profane. For the expression of this intuition in the context of
an environment with a heavy stake in the elaborated codes of a rationalist and materialist
world view which had subordinated the sacred to the profane, Eliot adapted for his own use

29
the poetics of juxtaposition.

The textual discontinuity of The Waste Land has usually been read as the technical
advance of a new aesthetic. The poetics of juxtaposition are often taken as providing the
enabling rationale for the accomplishment of new aesthetic effects based on shock and
surprise. And this view is easy enough to adopt when the poem is read in the narrow context
of a purely literary history of mutated lyric forms. However, when the context is widened and
the poem read as a motivated operation on an already always existing structure of
significations, this technical advance is itself significant as a critique of settled forms of
coherence. Discontinuity, from this perspective, is a symbolic form of “blasting and
bombardiering.” In the design of the whole poem, especially in its use of contemporary
anthropology, the broken textual surface must be read as the sign of the eruptive power of
subrational forces reasserting, seismically, the element totalities at the origins of culture and
mind. The poem’s finale is an orgy of social and elemental violence. The “Falling towers,”
lightning and thunder, unveil what Eliot, at that time, took to be the base where individual
mind and culture are united in the redemptive ethical imperatives spoken by the thunder.
What the poem attempts here, by ascribing these ethical principles to the voice of nature and
by drawing on the epistemological autonomy posited by symbolisme, is the construction of an
elaborated code in which an authoritative universalizing vision can be achieved using a
“notional” (mythic) idiom uncontaminated by Enlightenment forms of rationalism.

30
 Powerful as it is in the affective and tonal program of the poem, functioning as the
conclusion to the poem’s “argument,” this closural construction is, at best, precarious when
seen beyond the shaping force of the immediate social and cultural context. This
construction, achieved rhetorically, in fact is neither acceptable anthropology, nor sound
theology, nor incontestable history, but draws on all these areas in order to make the
necessary point in a particular affective climate. The extent to which the poem still carries
unsurpassable imaginative power indicates the extent to which our own time has not broken
entirely with the common intuitive life that the poem addressed 60 years ago.

31
 Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far
they can go…
Thomas Stearn Eliot

32
 William Golding The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983
“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”

33
 Biography

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was

educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose
College, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and present
occupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, a
sailor, and a musician. His father was a schoolmaster and his
mother was a suffragette. He was brought up to be a scientist, but
revolted. After two years at Oxford he read English literature
instead, and became devoted to Anglo-Saxon. He spent five years
at Oxford. Published a volume of poems in 1935. Taught at
Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury. Joined the Royal Navy in 1940 and spent six years
afloat, except for seven months in New York and six months helping Lord Cherwell at the
Naval Research Establishment. He saw action against battleships (at the sinking of the
Bismarck), submarines and aircraft. Finished as Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship. He
was present off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren.
After the war he returned to teaching, and began to write again. Lord of the Flies, his first
novel, was published in 1954. It was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. His other books are:

The Inheritors (novel) 1955

Pincher Martin (novel) 1956
The Brass Butterfly (play) 1958
Free Fall (novel) 1959
The Spire (novel) 1964
The Hot Gates (essays) 1965
The Pyramid (novel) 1967
The Scorpion God (three short novels) 1971
Darkness Visible (novel) 1979

Rites of Passage (novel) 1980

A Moving Target (essays and autobiographical pieces) 1982

34
 The Paper Men (novel) 1984
An Egyptian Journal 1985
Close Quarters (novel) 1987
Fire Down Below (novel) 1989

In 1980 he won the ‘Booker Prize’ for his novel Rites of Passage. He retired from
teaching in 1962. After that, he lived in Wiltshire, listing his recreations as music, sailing,
archaeology and classical Greek.

William Golding died in 1993.

Banquet Speech
William Golding’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1983

Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, Fellow Laureates, Ladies and
Gentlemen,I came to Sweden characterized as a pessimist, though I am an optimist. Now
something - perhaps the wonderful warmth of your hospitality - has changed me into a
comic. That is a hard position to sustain. It reminds me of days long ago when as a poor
teacher I would take turn about during the night with my wife, getting our infant daughter to
sleep. I remember once, how at three o’clock in the morning when I began to creep away
from the cradle with its sleeping child, she opened her eyes and remarked: “Daddy, say
something funny”.However, the moment has come for me to put off the jester’s cap and
bells.

I do thank Sweden for its wonderfully warm hospitality and I do thank the Nobel
Foundation and the Swedish Academy for the welcome and unexpected way in which they
have, so to speak, struck me with lightning. I only wish all borders were as easy to cross and
all international exchanges as friendly.

I have been in many countries and I have found there people examining their own love of
life, sense of peril, their own common sense. The one thing they cannot understand is why

35
that same love of life, sense of peril and above all common sense, is not invariably shared
among their leaders and rulers.Then let me use what I suppose is my last minute of
worldwide attention to speak not as one of a nation but as one of mankind. I use it to reach all
men and women of power. Go back. Step back now. Agreement between you does not need
cleverness, elaboration, manoeuvres. It needs common sense, and above all, a daring
generosity. Give, give, give!It would succeed because it would meet with worldwide relief,
acclaim and rejoicing: and unborn generations will bless your name.

From Golding’s Diary

On Monday 6 October 1983, Golding wrote in his journal:

“This morning at ten o’clock, Ingmar Whatsit rang from Stockholm. He then
mysteriously talked about a phone call I ‘might’ get in a couple of hours time and went on to
say it was a fifty/fifty chance that I would get the Nobel Prize! It is an example of thoughtless
selfishness that he should try to get a foot in the door by inflicting a couple of hours anxiety,
then a probable disappointment on me. That is a journalist all over. He is getting his foot in
the door. How thoughtless can you get? I am shaking with a quite unnecessary excitement –
no I’m not. I’m dismissing the idea and being calm.”

Golding had been disappointed before. However, this time his experience was different.
His journal records:

“At five past one the news was on radio and television – I’ve won the nobel prize. After
that the phone’s been on all day. I went riding, having left Ann in charge of the phone but
when I got back to the stables the television people were there. Then more television and
photographers and journalists turned up. It’s about ten o’clock and the last lot of Swedish
journalists have just gone.”

36
 The day was a strange one, but punctuated by moments of normality. It gave the
Goldings great pleasure that the first person to congratulate them in the flesh was their oldest
friend in Bowerchalke, Nancy Butler, whom they first met in 1940 and who appeared at their
back door minutes after the news was broadcast. Unfortunately, at some point during the
afternoon, Golding injured his right hand.
Subsequently, as each well-wisher vigorously wrung
that hand, Golding found himself concealing pain,
rather than the expected disappointment.

The award made Golding and his family very

happy. Controversy was generated by some remarks
attributed to one of the judges, implying that Golding
should not have had the prize. However, this matter
receded, and Golding himself was able to put it behind
him, acknowledging to himself that his writing could
rank with the work of many previous winners.In
November, Golding and his wife travelled to Stockholm to receive the award. They took with
them Golding’s long-time editor and friend, Charles Monteith, who had picked Lord of the
Flies off the reject pile at Faber and Faber in 1953. Golding always acknowledged his great
debt to Monteith, and the group of these three, the author, his wife and (always) first reader,
and his editor and publisher, was absolutely appropriate at this occasion.When Golding
received his medal from the king of Sweden, he was astonished to hear the young man
say:‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.’

The Nobel prize changed Golding’s life in many ways. There were more reporters, more
of a world-wide audience. However, his books were already widely available in many
languages, including minority ones. The difference was that after 1983 he became personally
more recognised. He was glad to use such fame for issues about which he felt deeply, above
all his environmental concerns, which figure in his Nobel lecture ( Moving Target, 2 nd
edition, 1984), and as ever the existence of man’s inhumanity. On such matters he continued
to write and to be concerned until his death. A sombre interchange in his journal, with a
holiday acquaintance, records their agreement that they felt they had made the world fairly

37
safe for their children, but were not so sure about their grandchildren.Golding’s medal and
citation are on indefinite loan to his old college, Brasenose College, Oxford, and can be seen
on request. In the citation, the Nobel Foundation spoke of: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.

On December 22nd 1983, Golding wrote in his journal:

“This morning David [his son] and I went into Salisbury and bought some presents – one
for him, and one each for the little boys [his three grandsons]. I have Ann’s. I think the Nobel
Prize is enough for me.”

The plot summary to the Lord of the Flies

The novel begins when two boys, Ralph and Piggy find themselves next to a plane crash
site, they are unaware of their surroundings. The boys soon find a conch shell, Piggy suggests
that Ralph blows on the conch to call for any others who might be on the island. The
situation on the island soon becomes apparent; there are many British school boys on the
island and no adults. Ralph holds an impromptu election and becomes the elected leader,
beating out another boy, Jack who was vying for the position. Ralph quickly calls everyone
together to work toward two common goals, 1)To have fun and 2) to be rescued.

For a time things on the island are civil, all the boys work toward building shelters,
gathering food and water, and generally surviving. The one goal which constantly gets
sidelined is keeping a signal fire going. All the fires on the island are lit using Piggy’s
glasses, The children are not organized enough to keep the fire going. Most distracting to the
goal is Jack’s wish to hunt the wild pigs on the island.

38
 Something which becomes a problem is the children’s belief in a Beast on the island. The
children begin to split the society on the island over the belief of the beast. Ralph attempts to
disprove the existence of the beast, Jack on the other hand wishes to exploit belief in the
beast for his own gain.

Later in the novel Jack forms a tribe separate from Ralph’s. Jack gains defectors from
Ralph’s tribe by promising them meat from hunting, fun, and most importantly protection
from the beast. Jack’s tribe becomes more brutal and totalitarian than Ralph’s tribe. Jack and
his tribe eventually become responsible for the murder of one of the boys, Simon. Jack also
steals Piggy’s glasses in order to make a cooking fire.

By this time Ralph’s tribe consists of just himself, Piggy, and two twins named Sam and
Eric. They all go to Jack’s tribe to try and get back Piggy’s glasses so he can see. In the
ensuing confrontation Piggy is killed and Sam and Eric both become part of Jack’s tribe,
leaving Ralph by himself.

In the final sequence of the book Jack forces his tribe on the hunt for Ralph, intending to
kill him. In order to do this Jack lights the entire island on fire. The fire is so large that it
attracts the attention of a Navy captain who comes to the island and rescues the boys. His
appearance on the island brings the children’s fighting to an abrupt halt.

When learning of the boys activities the Navy Captain Remarks, “I expected better from
British boys”.

Symbols in The Lord of the Flies .ii........................................

The Lord of the Flies contains many symbols used by the author to develop and support his

theme. These symbols include the following:

......Plane Crash: Failure or breakdown of society in the world outside; spread of corrupting ideas.
......Forest Scar: This path of destruction through the forest, caused by the crashing plane, appears to

represent the encroachment .......of corrupt civilization on the pristine island

......Island: Before the arrival of the boys, the Garden of Eden; after the arrival of the boys, the

39
corrupted world of humankind

......Conch: Civilized authority, democracy

......Eyeglasses of Piggy and Piggy Himself: Insight, wisdom, knowledge

......Death of Piggy and Destruction of Conch: Failure or breakdown of society on the island

......Signal Fire: Hope

......Imagined Beast: Fear, superstition. (The boys imagine that a monster in the form of a snake, a

sea monster, an ape, or other.”beasties” that they dream about lurks nearby.)
......Dead Parachutist: The beast. (In fact, the parachutist is a beast, for he has taken part in a war to

kill fellow human beings.)

......Chanting and Dancing of the Hunters: Blind emotion, loss of reason

......Logs on Which Ralph and Jack Sit: Seats of authority; thrones

......The Big Boys: The emerging generation of evil .......

......The Little Boys: The next generation of evil

......The Naval Officer: The present generation of evil

......The Killing of the First Pig: Original sin

The Killing of the Second Pig, the Sow: Release of perverted, Oedipal urges
......Jack’s Knife, Sticks Sharpened Into Spears: Weapons of war in the macrocosmic world; phalluses

as representations of .......masculine aggression

......Jack and Ralph: Perhaps Cain and Abel (although Ralph does not die, as Abel did in the Bible)
......The Impaled Pig’s Head (Lord of the Flies): The evil in every man’s

40
heart

References to other works

Lord of the Flies borrows key elements from R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857).
Ballantyne’s book, a simple adventure without any deep social themes, portrays three boys,
Ralph, Peterkin and Jack, who land on an island. Golding used two of the names in his book,
and replaced Peterkin with Simon. Lord of the Flies has been regarded as Golding’s response
showing what he believed would happen if children (or generally, people) were left to form a
society in isolation.

41
 Golding read ‘The Coral Island’ as he was growing up, and thought of Ballantyne as
racist, since the book teaches that evil is associated with black skin and is external. In
Chapter 11 of the original Lord of the Flies, Piggy calls Jack’s tribe “a pack of painted
niggers.” The term was not viewed as offensive in 1960s British society as it is today as there
was slightly more racism, being seen as a descriptive (rather than abusive) term for people of
dark skin. In any case, the word was changed to “savages” in some editions and “Indians” in
the mass media publication.

Influence

Printed works

Robert A. Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky, published in 1955, can be seen as a rebuttal to
Lord of the Flies as it concerns a group of teenagers stranded on a uninhabited planet who
manage to create a functional tribal society.

Stephen King has stated that the Castle Rock in Lord of the Flies was the inspiration for
the town of the same name that has appeared in a number of his novels. The book itself also
appears prominently in his novels Hearts in Atlantis and Cujo.[7] King’s fictional town in turn
inspired the name of Rob Reiner’s production company, Castle Rock Entertainment.

The DC Comics series Salvation Run is an adaptation of the “Lord of the flies” concept
with all the major DC Supervillains being marooned on an Alien planet

Television

Lord of the Flies inspired Sunrise Animation’s classic anime series Infinite Ryvius, which
follows the lives of nearly 500 teenagers stranded aboard a space battleship.

Also the “Das Bus” episode of the Simpsons is based on this book.

“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all,

we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English
are best at everything.”

42
WILLIAM GOLDING, Lord of the Flies

43