Resources

In Free Fall, Sammy Mountjoy meets Taffy at a meeting for the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Despite being engaged to Beatrice Ifor, Sammy is […]

The little Oa is a tree root carried by Liku in The Inheritors.

Pincher Martin Stranded on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, Christopher Martin suffers from insomnia. Sleep represents both comfort and fear to Martin: […]

Sim Goodchild owns the book shop in Greenfield, London. He is a peripheral character in the first two sections of Darkness Visible, but he becomes […]

Toni is the enigmatic twin sister of Sophy, who narrates the second section of Darkness Visible. The twins have a difficult relationship with their father, and […]

Pincher Martin In Pincher Martin, Christopher Martin has been shipwrecked and is surviving on a rock, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His time on […]

Nick Shales appears in the final part of Free Fall in a memory from the protagonist Sammy Mountjoy. According to Sammy, Shales was ‘the best teacher I […]

Mary Lovell appears in Christopher Martin’s flashbacks of memory throughout Pincher Martin. Martin, a repugnant misanthropist, is obsessed with the idea of possessing her, but is […]

Pincher Martin Christopher Martin’s desire to defeat death forms the narrative of this whole novel, as he battles to survive. Early on, he declares ‘I […]

On the original manuscript of The Inheritors, Golding wrote that the ‘centre symbol is the waterfall, the time stream, the fall, the second law of thermodynamics’. […]

Fa is a member of ‘The People’ in The Inheritors. Although not explicitly stated, it is likely that she is the mother of Liku, and is […]

As many of Golding’s novels feature aspects of survival, hunger is a recurrent theme.