The Spire by William Golding

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Nothing William Golding wrote about is what Golding wrote about—he was a master of metaphor, and his 1964 novel The Spire is a good example (as was his masterful Lord of the Flies, still on many reading lists). And what is the answer to this question? The sculptor shakes his head. "Humming in the throat, headshake, doglike, eager eyes." Is the dumb sculptor denying that Jocelin's humility is vulnerable? Or is he denying that he ever thought of portraying Jocelin as an angel in the first place? Jocelin's extrapolation is, after all, based on a gesture. Father Adam is dubbed by Jocelin as " Father Anonymous", indicating Jocelin's feelings of superiority. Until the end of the novel, when Father Adam becomes Jocelin's caretaker, he is largely a minor character who is surprised by how Jocelin was never taught to pray, doing his best to help him to heaven.

Nu știu exact care e miza autorului, nici nu prea mă interesează. Lectura a fost iar potrivită, având în vedere ultimele "bârfe". Nu condamn construcția de biserici și edificii:)). Poate că pe parcursul istoriei unii capi de biserică au fost mai preocupați de ziduri decât de oameni, fie și așa. Nu sunt oare atât de frumoase?! Bine că le-au făcut! Să nu ne plângem, se preocupă Hristos de noi și noi unii de alții. Jocelin ceases to care. He neglects his religious duties and stops praying. All his waking hours are devoted to spurring the workmen on to build higher and higher, even climbing up the scaffolding himself to help their endeavours. I read this book years ago with the Guardian Reading Group and had a chance to ask Golding’s daughter a question at the end of the month. Many participants did not like the book because the protagonist is not likeable, but I thought it was a very sad and tragic story in the end. Jocelin acquired his job through a family connection and was otherwise completely ill-equipped for the role. He had neither the intelligence or the faith—the spire he sees as his purpose. (He came to mind often during the Trump Presidency.) Because the narrative is a very narrow 3rd person, every event and conversation is filtered through the Dean’s increasingly distorted, self-centred mind. The reader has to read past that to try to understand what is happening.(“The Inheritors” uses a similar technique.)As he gazed out of his classroom window towards Salisbury Cathedral , the author William Golding considered the technical challenges of constructing its 404 foot spire. The result was his 1964 novel The Spire, an intense narrative about a man who believes he has a God given mission to build a magnificent spire on top of a cathedral, bringing glory to the town and its people closer to God. I found it a challenging book to read yet a completely engrossing portrayal of obsession and mental degeneration The Spire by William Golding: Footnotes Religious imagery is used towards the end of the novel, where Jocelin lies dying. Jocelin declares "it's like the apple-tree!", making a reference to the Garden of Eden and Humanity's first sin of temptation but also perhaps the pagan ideas that have been constantly threaded into Jocelin's mind as he spends more and more time up in the Spire, raised above the ground (and further away from his church and his role as God's voice on earth). A priest builds a spire on a cathedral according to a spiritual vision, believing it to be the calling of God and dependant upon his will and faith to bring it to completion, destroying his congregation, vocation and sanity in the process.

Comparisons between Goody and Rachel, Roger Mason's wife, are made throughout the novel. Jocelin believes Goody sets an example to Rachel, whom he dislikes for her garrulousness and for revealing that her marriage to Roger remains unconsummated. However, Jocelin overestimates Goody's purity, and is horrified when he discovers Goody is embarking upon an affair with Roger Mason. Tortured by envy and guilt, Jocelin finds himself unable to pray. He is repulsed by his sexual thoughts, referred to as "the devil" during his dreams. This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. ( July 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.' This is Golding describing dust. The cathedral of stone is being dismantled and added to – creating a cathedral of dust, a phantom, a twin. In Seeing Things, Seamus Heaney evokes "a pillar of radiant house-dust". Here is Golding's creation of not one pillar, but several: "Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral … He shook his head in rueful wonder at the solid sunlight." So, as temporary as a mayfly and a serious rival and replacement. Solid sunlight. Dust definitively described by a master. The Spire is told in third person, but focalized strictly, stream of consciousness-style, through the remarkable, unhinged mind of Jocelin: a psychological twin for the murky, marshy depths uncovered beneath the cathedral floor. (Golding likes his Freud; not for nothing is this a novel about a spire.) A spare selection of characters are ranged around Jocelin’s wounded, flailing, ecstatic consciousness, and they complement him well, especially the brilliant, tormented architect Roger Mason and his shrewish wife Rachel (shrewish in Jocelin’s perspective, at least; Golding is too adept at maintaining his focalizing character’s point of view for us to have any confidence that Jocelin’s vision of these characters would bear any resemblance to how we might see them ourselves.) Kule; evet bir Sineklerin Tanrısı değil. Ancak şu takıntıdan kurtulalım artık. Bu başka bir roman. (Nasıl da kendi takıntımı sizlere mal ettim ama:)