As in Lord of The Flies, her also the survival-adventure situation is prominent. Martin is in situation, as he is caught between survival and death. It may be noted that Martin is mixing his supposedly real situation on the rock with memories of his past and fears of his future. Here neither survival nor extinction is the problem, but the critical moment in between the two, the tormenting flashbacks of his past life. The whole drama is on the rock, and the suffering which Martin undergoes is the situation in which he is. This may be symbolic of the battle of all men for salvation.
Having discussed the theme, the impact of the form and method of the novel may be examined. There is only one character in the novel that deserves a name and the whole story revolves round him. This one and only worthy character is placed in situation. His thoughts are determined by the situation and the character is not allowed to progress in the first four chapters. Martin appears to be a very vigorous spirit, with a challenging mood, ready to face the perilous process of living. Martin is put in a seemingly heroic atmosphere, and he fights heroically about in his passion. But this development into heroic stature is limited and subjected to the demands of the situation.
As Golding stresses here on situation his protagonist has become “a doomed modern hero, greedy for survival at all costs”. From the very first page of the novel onwards, we are allowed to see the picture of Martin’s self and thereby knowledge is created that Christopher Hardly Martin is not simply a Naval Officer, but more than that, he is Everyman. By placing the hero ‘between the devil and the mid-sea’, which is not a totally unexpected situation for the mariner, Golding has been able to suffuse the universal tragic situation into his novel. Even though characterization is not stressed upon, Golding’s Martin becomes heroic, since the tragic intensity of the situation increases his importance. So the method of subordinating character to situation in order to achieve depth displays the form as such of the novel of situation.
If we are to accept the period of struggle lasting for seven days we can detect each day’s agony as each stage in his passage to the “Otherworld”. In the first day’s struggle, Martin pledges that he will not so willingly let himself die. He thinks high of himself and believes that his self is something very precious to be preserved. So he decides to fight against nature to preserve his life and thinks that upholding it is considered to be proof of life. His thoughts are hard and at the same time unconnected, but they nourish a central idea-his strong determination to live. This is proof of ego, and Golding has expressed his view that Martin is greatly egocentric. Even in adverse circumstances, his ego will not allow him to yield to God’s grace, and as though he were Dr.Faustus he is challenging the Almighty. It is only once that he admits his failure against the elemental forces:
Give up the thought of return, the thought of living. Break up, leave go . . . An hour on this rock is a life-time. What have you to lose? There is nothing here but torture. Give up Leave go.
On all other occasions he is proud in his intelligences, and believes in his indestructibility. In order to enhance the tragic intensity of Martin’s situation on the rock the protagonist’s capacity to fight against the elemental forces is exaggerated. And therefore the character portrayal is with the purpose of increasing the larger scope of the situation of the novel. The terror of the situation inflicted a feeling of nothingness and loss of personality in him. At first he is not able to speak out and only some routine words come out. The second day’s agony is different from the first, since it conditions Martin’s feelings and thought. The terrible loneliness and the hopelessness of situation, this second day, paved the way for self analysis, and thereby Martin’s attitude to other people and himself is revealed. Recollections of the by gone days strike a heavy feeling of guilt in his mind. The picture of Nathaniel in his mind might have intensified the guilt in his conscience. Martin, in his sufferings, realized his evil and guilt. His sufferings might be a way for salvation. The self-awareness obtained by the protagonists is depicted through the clever manipulation of the situation in the novel. There is no interaction of complicated personalities in the novel to enhance its complexity. It is the pathetic predicament of the protagonist that determines his complex behavior and personality. The struggle against the elemental forces in the third day brings Martin to the brim of insanity. He becomes doubtful of his identity disc gave proof of existence, imported a new found sanity to him. He could master up strength to master his critical situation. As an eristic has observed, “To maintain one’s identity in his circumstances is as hard as it was for Ralph to remain alive in Lord of The Flies. Even sleep is dangerous in such situations”. Martin’s situation worsens on fourth day. He declared the fourth day as a thinking day. On this day, he began to think of God and God’s grace. But by now he has traveled much and he is far away from the grace of God. His ego prompted his will to disregard the grace of God even in adverse circumstances. The struggle of the fifth day tightens the tension of the situation and he becomes a neurotic. The fifth day gave him the feeling of God’s grace and rescue in his imagination. But still he holds on to the importance of the two weapons such as ‘intelligence’ and ‘thought’. He values his rational thinking more than the capacity of his self to attain spirituality. The agony of the fifth day collapsed his whole thinking mechanism and he found it difficult to distinguish between reality and illusion. A state of neurosis affected him. The sixth day was more fatal since madness had already overtaken him. On this day, in spite of all his efforts to remain sane, he is pushed into insanity. On the seventh day his journey to the other world is completed. Thus the seven day’s struggle describes the process of dying. Here Golding has created ‘a new myth – the myth of dying – both with its literal and metaphysical implications”. In conclusion, it may by argued that being over confident of his intelligence and imagination he moved away from God and became ego centric, stage by stage. Recollections of his past prove him to be devilish in nature and even in states of agony he is no better than before. It is the sin of pride that he commits and moves to the other world, since his ego will not allow him to beg for God’s mercy. So the seven day’s struggle is the dramatic presentation of Martin’s passage from this world to the other. Here Golding is drawing a modern situation, the situation of war and it’s after math, in order to emphasize the spiritual aspect of the novel.
The novel will chiefly be remembered for the human situation it presents and it shows the real world in which we are all “in situation”. Martin’s obsession with an alien world is symbolic of modern man’s predicament. Martin is the model of man who lacks the faith in God and who has a passion for life, always standing immovable before fate. The situation of the skeptic man, fully alienated from human beings in an alien world at the time of death, has great novelistic scope in picturing the condition of modern man. We can even consider Martin as representative of the men of post-war England. The novel is to be read as an account of the experiences of a man struggling for existence. The novel can exist only by support of the situation in which Martin is put. Martin’s situation on the Rock all alone in the Atlantic is the kernel of the story. The frightening experience of Martin, ‘the mind whirl of elements as well as the swirl of his own darkness’ is not something imposed upon, but it is the very life-blood of the novel. Without such an incident with such tragic intensity, there is no novel. It shows Golding’s deep sense of agony about what has gone wrong with the world we live in.
The plot takes its shape from the exalted imagination of a personal experience from Golding’s life in the sea. Martin is endowed with many of Golding’s external conditions of life. The situation of man against sea may be a nightmare in his mind as he was fully possessed by such occasions during his war days. His participation in the naval cooperation in the Second World War helped to develop in him religious and philosophical thoughts. As he witnessed the terrible cruelty and the human nature of modern man he realized the deterioration of integrity and personal values in modern man. This appears to be the driving force in Golding, while writing the novels of the early period. As such, some thesis is discernible from the novels emanating from the religious situations designed by the novelist in order to develop his philosophy based on his discovery of modern man. In the early novels, Golding develops the philosophy that survival must come from within and met from external fight. This is a basic factor in his thesis novels. The question of liberation from within has a religious implication and this can be found in Pincher Martin. Martin is not free from the sin of pride and cruelty. He showed cruelty to Nathaniel and his inordinate assessment of himself is a sure sign of his evil mind. First he must purge himself off from these sins, and then only he can liberate himself from his physical as well as mental bondage. Whether Golding is recommending the pill of religion for the evil in mind is not easily discernible but he is showing the process of self-examination of the protagonist. Golding’s shift in the method of presenting the protagonist as turning into himself finds its way first in Pincher Martin and then in Free Fall. Here the central character is Sammy Mount joy, in whose mind the whole action of the novel takes place. And the action of the novel seems to be revolving round some abstract idea developed in the novel by at of three questions and its answers. The three questions are those that germinated in the mind of the protagonist and finding answers to them is the culminating point which is the thesis of the novel. The three questions projected in the mind of the central character point to the fallen condition of man in a world of flux and events. The three questions focus on the reality of domination in a world of misery and hopelessness. He wanted to measure the depth of a feeling in human heart and also he is bothered about the question as to how to find a pattern for the apparent disorder in human life. Finding answers to the three questions seems to be the basic task of the novel. And this ma be why this novel is termed as the most mystifying of Golding’s novels.