Construction of Identity/World and ‘Symbolic Death’: A Lacanian Approach to William Golding’s Pincher Martin

Abstract William Golding’s Pincher Martin is about the problem of maintaining one’s identity in the face of death/non-existence. To give himself an illusion of being alive, Martin, who died at the beginning of the novel, creates a fictitious world of a rock, to which he clings for metaphysical survival. The rock where his survival is staged is, in a metaphorical sense, Lacanian symbolic order which is created to give Martin a sense of identity, while protecting him against Lacanian real, his non-existence. Martin, however, would not admit the fictionality of his world which also implies the fictitiousness of his own identity. At the end of the novel, the black lightening, Lacanian real as “unquestionable nothingness” (Golding 1956/2013: 95), reveals the fictionality of Martin’s symbolic order, and erases the rock as well as Martin himself whose identity is constructed on his fictional world, as if they were words written on the paper. This is Martin’s second death as the Žižekian ‘symbolic death’ which exposes the fictionality of the symbolic order and human identity.