The Dialogic, Unfinalizable, and Heteroglossic in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954): A Bakhtinian Reading

Abstract

As a persistently profound source of inspiring ideas, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) continues to attract researchers with novel concepts and notions to be addressed. Whenever researchers seem to have exhausted the text in critical writings and used up its possible subjects, the novel’s supply of ever fresher and more original ideas seems to keep flowing. Therefore, the current research study intends to examine certain concepts such as dialogism, unfinalizability and heteroglossia in Lord of the Flies from a Bakhtinian perspective, which is a new approach to the novel. No research study before this one has—to the best knowledge of the researcher—addressed Lord of the Flies or these concepts from such an angle. As the title suggests, the present study explores the concepts mentioned earlier by examining the diversity, difference, and variety of characters in the novel, their views and ideas on numerous issues such as leadership, survival, rescue, fire, hunting, masking and the like. It employs Bakhtin’s views and theorizations as a theoretical reference outline for its main argument. The analysis of the paper will address the diversity, variety and multiplicity of different views, plural opinions, and assorted narrative voices as demonstrated by the novel’s characters to show their dialogic, unfinalizable and heteroglossic nature.