A Bakhtinian Analysis of William Golding's Rites of Passage

This work analyzes William Golding's Rites of Passage using a detailed examination of the Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque to investigate the points of mutual illumination and confirmation between Bakhtin's ideas and Golding's novel. Therefore the method of analysis is divided between a close study of Rites of Passage and an equally close examination of Bakhtin's ideas. The Bakhtinian concepts studied in this work are central to his idea of language and theory of the novel and their analysis in Rites of Passage reveals that while these concepts shed light on the stylistic, structural and thematic complexities of the novel, the novel also verifies the working of these concepts in practice.