المستخلص: |
Applying a Derridean deconstructionist approach, this paper sets out to prove how Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), ends up blurring the boundary between ‘discipline’ and ‘anti-discipline’ conceptually so that the line separating both notions keeps vanishing till the end of the novel, becoming, thus, hardly detectable. This study aims to highlight the eventual fall of a group of English schoolboys, who are stranded in an unpopulated tropical island, in the predisposition of doing anti-disciplinary acts, bespeaking, then, the novel’s dystopia. The initial attempt of some characters, like Ralph and Piggy, to set a rigorous discipline, whether in exchanging talks or dividing tasks, soon dissipates under the enticement of the frenetic whims of idleness and total carelessness to do any type of work while hunting pigs and having fun with the other boys. However, the main import of my paper is to evince the way the boys’ apparent succumbing to anti-disciplinary impulses includes within it a subtle discipline that is delicately interspersed in the very internal texture of such impulses. For any mischievous act they choose to do on their virgin island, the group of boys concoct for it its own fashion to be implemented successfully, providing, thus, a parodic version of ‘discipline’. Accordingly, I touch the relevance in the novel of the Derridean notion of ‘contamination’ whereby each element of an opposite pair is made to be contaminated by the other, resulting in the eventual corrosion of differences between concepts.
|