Eco, Golding’s Rites of Passage and Breaching the Limits of Being
Öz
William Golding’s novel Rites of
Passage (1980) explores the depths of human experience, absorbed in and
struggling against the cognitive, ontological and referential limits inherent
in its essence. By portraying Edmund Talbot and James Colley on an
equator-crossing voyage to Australia, Golding emphasizes the fact that it is
darkness that lies beyond the lines that systemize and limit human existence,
which is manifested by Colley’s death. In this way, Rites of Passage comports with Umberto Eco’s theory of ‘contractual
realism’, elaborated in Kant and the
Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (1999), in a sense that it
asserts that within a framework of a cultural contract, there are certain
things that we as human beings are vetoed from doing in our inquiry after the
essence of Being. This article provides a thematic examination of William
Golding’s novel Rites of Passage in
the light of Umberto Eco’s theory of ‘contractual realism’.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Umberto Eco,William Golding,contractual realism,being,truth,limit
Kaynakça
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