Panoptic Vision and Ontological Belief in William Golding’s The Double Tongue

Abstract

The present paper focuses on William Golding’s panoptic vision and ontological beliefs prevalent in his novel The Double Tongue. The paper attempts to revisit the binary oppositions of good and evil, rational and spiritual which form the basis of his ontological analysis. The antithetic form of faith and reason has been analyzed to understand Golding’s panoptic vision which shows gradual shift from ignorance to revelation. The paper has undergone an enquiry into the limitations of binary world amid chaos of existence, taking readers to a flight from panoptic vision to beyond the boundary. William Golding's Ionides is by all accounts a character of oddities, yet it is Arieka who is the developed character, pure in heart and assumes her job with him strictly as a steady friend. Ionides is a critic, a skeptical, contriver while Arieka, showing up in Delphi at fourteen years old, has confidence in the Olympians, "every one of them twelve”. Arieka has an intensity of prognosticating and mending what provoked Ionides to bring her at Delphi, yet at the center of the fiction Arieka at Delphi is by all accounts encompassed by question about the intensity of Apollo or prophet where as Ionides, "self-conflicting man ". Hence, Golding’s ‘The Double Tongue’ quests a panoptic vision of truth that is beyond the darkness of evil and sin, passions and desires, apparently seeking revival of mankind amid the prevalent chaos of existence.