Thinking Christian

We have a special post this evening from a distinguished guest author: my sixteen-year-old daughter Lisa. She completed this project for her 10th grade Advanced English class. Be assured I would not have posted it here if it weren’t a real contribution to the blog. Bibliography and references here.

British author Charles Kingsley once said, “There is a great deal of human nature in man” (Charles Kingsley Quotes). No man can ever escape that truth. C.S. Lewis and William Golding present their views about the nature of man in their writing. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Golding’s Lord of the Flies present in the argument concerning the nature of man; Golding’s claim is that man is innately evil, while Lewis shows that the nature of man has changed, originally being pure, facing and giving in to temptation, and then becoming evil. The authors use their characters, symbolism, and synecdoches to express their points to the reader.

The characters in The Lord of the Flies and C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy show the nature of man as evil, but Lewis presents mankind as redeemable. When Ralph and Piggy in The Lord of the Flies introduce themselves to each other, Piggy asks Ralph not to let anyone call him Piggy, however, when they meet the rest of the boys, Ralph introduces him as Piggy. Piggy says, “’I don’t care what they call me, … so long as they don’t call me what they used to call me at school.’…’What was that?’…‘They used to call me ‘Piggy’’” (Golding 11). “He’s not Fatty’ cried Ralph, ‘His real name’s Piggy!’” (Golding 21).

The fact that Ralph introduces “the fat boy” as Piggy though he was asked not to shows that Ralph’s desire for power over someone overtakes his morality and causes him to be rude and mean to Piggy, showing rudeness and a tendency towards evil.

According to David Spitz, Golding stated that the theme of Lord of the Flies was “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable” (quoted. in Spitz 22). David Spitz’s essay in The Antioch Review reminds us that no one can know a book better than the author himself. He also states,

There were no classes, no divisions, no inequalities based on previous status, except for Jack, who initially appears at the head of a group of uniformed choirboys, a relationship and a dress that are quickly terminated, the only significant sign of difference is that of age. Even though there were no real social or economic classes on the island in Lord of the Flies, the boys still separated themselves by age, physical ability, and mental ability. The separation leads to factions among the boys over who should lead and the eventual split of Jack’s followers away from Ralph’s.

This shows that over time the evil that is innate in the characters overtakes the good in them.

In Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis’s character Ransom must attempt to describe the nature of the “bent” men who kidnapped him and flew him to Malacandra. It is difficult for Ransom to explain their nature because Malacandra is a planet that is free of evil, and the closest word they have to evil is bent, meaning, in this context, twisted or crooked. Lewis writes,

Had he come alone? No he had come with two others of his kind – bad men (“bent” men was the nearest hrossian equivalent) who tried to kill him, but he ran away from them. The hrossa found this very difficult, but all finally agreed that he ought to go to Oyarsa. Oyarsa would protect him (Perelandra 38).

Even though there is no true evil in Malacandra, they understand that some of the hrossa are bent, or imperfect. Though the innate leanings of the hrossa, sorns, and pfifltriggi are not evil, but good, the hnau (rational inhabitants of Malacandra as a whole) are capable of choosing evil. In the Journal of Bible and Religion, Carl E. Purinton says,

C.S. Lewis has a very vivid sense of the reality of evil. He is by no means willing to view evil as “incomplete good” as idealistic philosophy has sometimes done (Purinton 186).

Purinton reminds the reader that though philosophers have tried to pass off evil as “incomplete good,” C.S. Lewis was staunchly against this, and used his Space Trilogy to show this. The characters in Out of the Silent Planet do not know the magnitude that evil can reach, yet they do realize that not everyone follows the patterns of a morally ideal society. In the beginning of Lord of the Flies, the characters follow the guidelines they created, however, as time goes on, they stop following those guidelines.

C.S. Lewis uses a company called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E) in the novel That Hideous Strength as a synecdoche for the evil in the world, while Golding’s Lord of the Flies uses an island with a group of boarding school boys. Jack states that he and the other boys are not savages, though later on in the story he and his choir boys, especially Roger, become savage and completely forget what it is like to be civilized. In Lord of the Flies, Jack states,

I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and follow them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things (Golding 42).

This shows that although Jack claims to be confident that he is not a savage, he has to reassure himself. He must remind himself, and others, that they are English, and therefore the best at everything. Golding used boarding school boys in his novel because, having been a schoolmaster for many years, he knew their nature. He then placed those characters in an unfamiliar territory, an island. David Spitz writes,

‘He kept them under the age of overt sex, for he wished to exclude this as a casual factor. He excluded too private property and the struggle for survival – neither work nor robbery was essential for existence, and hence avoided the controversy that engaged Dühring and Engels over the Robinson Crusoe story: whether political power (force) or economic power (exploitation) should be given the higher priority. Along with Freud and Marx and Darwin, he banished Caesar, for there was no danger of external aggression and hence no need for an army. Finally, there were no classes, no divisions, no inequalities based on previous status’ (Spitz 23).

Although the characters have no outside influences for good or evil during the course of the novel, they choose to do evil, killing others and taking advantage of each other.

In Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, at a banquet at the N.I.C.E headquarters, called Belbury, the ‘head’ of the N.I.C.E. begins to give a speech, but it quickly turns to nonsense. Everyone had been looking forward to it, however, as the banquet begins, no one can understand anything that is said.

“Had his hearing gone wrong? For Jules seemed to be saying that the future density of mankind depended on the implosion of the horses of nature. ‘He’s drunk,’ thought Frost. Then, crystal clear in articulation, beyond all possibility of mistake, came ‘The madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised’” (That Hideous Strength 341).

This is a classical allusion to the tower of Babel in the biblical book of Genesis. The people of Babel become prideful and try to build a tower to reach heaven. However, as a punishment for their pride, God changes the languages of the people so they can no longer understand each other. Charles Jack once said, “‘When you say a speech, you couldn’t talk nonsense. That’s a speech’” (quoted in Abrahams 395). It is agreed that a speech should make sense, at least to those familiar with the jargon of the group that is giving the speech. The speech at the Banquet of Belbury is not understandable to anyone except the speaker, Jules, as they all hear nonsense.

The allusion to the tower of Babel story is an allusion to the overt pride of that group of people. Similarly, the characters in Lord of the Flies, especially Jack and Roger, become more and more prideful and overconfident during the course of the novel.

The two authors use symbolism to portray their messages of the nature of man. The conch shell is an important symbol in The Lord of the Flies, representing authority, power, and civilization. Towards the end of the novel, Ralph thinks,

“But then the fatal unreasoning knowledge came to him again. The breaking of the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapor. These painted savages would go further and further. Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never” (Golding 184).

This is soon before Ralph finds out from Samneric that the tribe of savages is going to start searching for him the next day to try to kill him. He is trying to retain some hope, but it is slowly slipping away. David Spitz feels that Piggy is the character who helps the conch keep its power as a symbol of authority and civilization. “Though Ralph discovers it,” writes Spitz, “it is Piggy who understands its significance as a symbol of legitimacy, an instrument of reason and order” (Spitz 26).

Spitz’s perspective communicates the importance of Piggy, as well as the conch shell, as symbols. He later states of Ralph,

The boys secede from his rule, they destroy the conch; and ultimately, their passions inflamed, they seek even to put him to death. Thus consent, like reason and revelation, is abandoned as a principle of authority (Spitz 26-27).

The symbolism used in Lord of the Flies is one of the most prominent ways the author communicates his point that the nature of man is evil.

C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy abounds with symbolism, from the names of people and places to an entire planet. “Ransom,” the name given to the main character in the novel, alludes to the payment (ransom) that Jesus paid for the wrongdoing of mankind (Lewis 10). “Mr. Devine,” the name of one of the main protagonists, is an ironic symbol, as “divine” means “of, relating to, or proceeding directly from God or a god” (Lewis 11).

These, as well as other names and places, are only snippets of the symbolism in the series, as the entirety of the trilogy is a set of symbols, Out of the Silent Planet representing Earth before the fall of mankind, Perelandra representing Venus as a new Eden, and That Hideous Strength symbolizing the Babel story of the Christian Bible. According to Marianne Bonwit,

In this concluding volume of his Utopian trilogy [That Hideous Strength], C.S. Lewis states the “Babel” theme in his title; this is taken from Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Dialog: “The schaddow of that hydduous strenth/ Sax miles and more it is of lenth/ Thus may ye juge in to your thocht/ Gyfe Babylone be heych or nocht.” …The scientists Frost and Wither have almost succeeded in dominating England by means of the N.I.C.E., and all-comprehensive technological organization. They are out to enslave, and, if necessary, kill all but a chosen few (Bonwit 240-241).

Bonwit shows that the entire novel, That Hideous Strength (including the title), are symbols. The character Ransom serves throughout Lewis’s trilogy as a portrait of good overcoming evil. The use of symbolism in both Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Golding’s Lord of the Flies increases the impact and meaning found in the novels.

While the two authors have similar views on the nature of man, they also have differences in thought. Lewis believed that man was evil but could be redeemed, while Golding’s works show that he simply thought of man as innately evil. As Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes once said, “The problem with people is that they’re only human” (Bill Watterson Quotes). Both authors would agree with this statement, because no matter a person’s opinion on human nature, everyone must concur that people are blighted by the flaws of human nature.

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