Pincher Martin

Christopher Hadley Martin is a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He is serving on the British ship Wildebeest when a German U-boat attacks it. Although he drowns soon after the attack, Martin’s astounding arrogance and self-obsession prevent his conscious mind from acknowledging death. As the author told Radio Times magazine in 1958, “[Martin’s] drowned body lies rolling in the Atlantic but the ravenous ego invents a rock for him to endure on.” (Carey, John. William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. Faber & Faber. 2009.)

Martin has virtually no spiritual or emotional inner-life and instead expresses his personality almost entirely through bodily appetites. The rock in many ways manifests these appetites, right down to the jagged rocks at the water’s edge that resemble teeth. Flashbacks reveal the extent to which Martin’s basest appetites—and his rage at having them unfulfilled—drive him. He rapes Mary because she refuses to have sex with him, and he attempts to murder Nathaniel because he married Mary.

Although the narrative doesn’t reveal the source of Martin’s toxicity and moral bankruptcy, loose images from his stream of consciousness suggest a childhood trauma, possibly inflicted by his mother. Perhaps the narrative omits the details of this trauma because the author doesn’t wish to justify Martin’s actions. In any case, that trauma follows him his entire life, alienating him to the point that he embraces a misanthropic attitude and lifestyle.

Ultimately, Martin’s delusion crumbles when the “black lightning” from Nathaniel’s lecture obliterates everything except “the centre and the claws” (184), the rawest symbolic representations of his ego and appetite, respectively. Given that the black lightning symbolizes the total self-negation that comes to those without love or spirituality, the narrative implies that Martin knows his death is imminent at the novel’s end, even as he continues to resist it.