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Pincher Martin

Pincher Martin (Faber and Faber 1956) is the third novel by William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). When it was originally published in the United States, its title was changed to The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, but later it was returned to its British name. It develops the themes introduced in Lord of the Flies concerning the cruelty at the basic nature of mankind underneath the thin veneer of civilization.

Plot summary

The novel is set during World War Two, on a remote islet in the North Atlantic and charts a British sailor's attempt to stay alive there after his ship is torpedoed. He finds small pools of rain water to drink and eats cockles prised from the rock. As the weather worsens and his condition deteriorates, Martin reviews his life. This part of the book ends with what appears to be a storm, with 'black lightning', in which Martin becomes convinced that supernatural forces are trying to kill him, and rails against them.

However the novel features a twist ending which makes it clear that Martin actually drowned shortly after his ship was sunk, and this changes the work into an allegory of purgatory and damnation.

When asked about his intentions in Pincher Martin by Archie Campbell in a BBC interview shortly after the novel's appearance, Golding gave a clear and unambiguous paraphrase of the novel's theme:

'To achieve salvation, individuality--the persona--must be destroyed. But suppose the man is nothing but greed? His original spirit, God-given, the Scintillans Dei, is hopelessly obscured by his thirst for separate individual life. What can he do at death but refuse to be destroyed? Inhabit a world he invents from half-remembered scraps of physical life, a rock which is nothing but the memory of an aching tooth-ache? To a man greedy for life, tooth-ache is preferable to extinction, and that is the terrible secret of purgatory, it is all the world that the God-resisting soul cannot give up.'