THE CONTESTATION OF THE OVERARCHING TRUTH THROUGH POSTMODERN TECHNIQUES IN GOLDING’S RITES OF PASSAGE

Abstract

William Golding’s Rites of Passage (1980) that concretizes several postmodern tropes contests the overarching truth by means of utilising the salient postmodern features. Golding employs multiple narrators to display the relativity and subjectivity of truth. Golding resorts to another postmodern technique of using gaps, omissions and delays to investigate the uncertainty of reality. Furthermore, the novelist draws upon intertextuality, another indispensable component of postmodern fiction, to demonstrate that a text always absorbs other texts and transforms them. Besides, Rites of Passage instantiates the postmodern parodic mode by dint of ridiculing the eighteenth-century epistolary and picaresque novels. This novel also highlights its own status as a fictional construct by referring to itself. Taking its cue from postmodernism, this paper argues that Rites of Passage subverts grand narratives and their claims to absolute truths. Hence, Golding demonstrates that truths are not universal, but contextual, perspectival and socially constructed.