Your Cart

• Log in

• Related Products
• Parent
  • • International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
• Associated
  • • Nontraditional College Students
  • • Women’s Empowerment As Determinant for Maintanance and Sustainability of Portable Water and Sanitation Facilities in Ekiti State, Nigeria
  • • Conservatively-Romantic Tendency in Political Conception
  • • A Review on the Development, Challenges and Contributions of Independent Film Activities in Malaysia Film Industry
  • • Learning inside Multidisciplinary Project Teams
  • • Prospects of Social Enterprises from a Framing Perspective
  • • Importing Foreign Labor and Human Rights Deprivation
  • • Changing Teachers’ Practice through Critical Reflection on Pedagogy
  • • Voices on the Outside
  • • The Challenges of Accessing Information and Communication Technologies as Indicated by Women Entrepreneurs in Pretoria, South Africa
  • More →

The Absurd Rebel on an Imaginary Rock

By Nabil A. Jalil, Arbaayah Ali Termizi and Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya.

Published by The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

In his novel Pincher Martin, William Golding places his protagonist, Pincher Martin, in an extreme situation where the lines between reality and imagination are blurred. The result is that the protagonist’s struggles for his existence verges on the absurd. Still it is not a story for mere fantasy. Golding is known to convey a moral lesson in his novels (Surrete 1994), and Pincher Martin is certainly no exception. The struggle of the protagonist can be seen as a story about human existence and the absurd struggle in life against death. The protagonist becomes a representative of the human individual faced with the realization of his own mortality and the absurdity of his life. These are themes which existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus addresses in their philosophy, as Whitehead points out (1971). However, Whitehead’s approach is to look at the novel through the Sartrean psychological concept of imagination which makes the protagonist struggle an outcome of mere fantasy. To examine the existential dilemma of the protagonist and his absurd struggle against death, this paper proposes to uses Albert Camus’ philosophical concepts of the absurd and absurd rebellion to look at the novel in a new light.

International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp.187-196. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 976.140KB).

Nabil A. Jalil

PhD Candidate, English Department, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia

Dr. Arbaayah Ali Termizi

Senior Lecturer, English Language Department, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya

Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia