Voice and choice: a study of polyphony and its relation to the problem of free will in William Goldin’s Free fall

Abstract

In this study of William Golding’s Free fall, the polyphonic structure of the novel is analyzed through the stylistic marks that separate different and opposing voices incorporated in the narrator's discourse: Since the narrator is also the protagonist, those voices are a reflection of the central character's perspective of events at different phases of his life, the philosophical questioning of the problem of free will is what moves the central character's retrospective examination of his life. So the present work also includes an analysis of the philosophical frame that underlies his transition from a naive to a mature viewpoint. The stilistics analysis of the mix of discourses in the central character's narrative is based on Mikhail Bakhtin's dynamic view of the polyphonic novel. Bakhtin's polyphonic structure is here associated with Sartre's existential philosophy, the central character of Free fall is analyzed as a consciousness in the process of defining itself through moral choices associated with the events narrated; it has been possible to link Bakhtin's and Sartre's ideas since both theoreticians see man in a process of becoming.