Published in 1956, William Golding’s Pincher Martin is one of the strongest literary links between the age of British high modernism and the postmodern novel. The novel has been overlooked for many years, but it has begun to receive the attention that it deserves. In many ways, Pincher Martin is a literary achievement on the scale of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Although Pincher Martin lacks the symbolic scope of these earlier novels, it is, just as they were, concerned with the mental processes of a main character observed over a relatively short span of time. In Pincher Martin’s case, this time span is the life that can be lived and fought for in the very brief minutes before death.

Joyce and Woolf focused on the extension of the modern novel and used both realism and symbolism, but Golding was much more concerned with the allegorical relationship between seen reality and hidden reality. The medieval allegorist took as the starting point of meaning the intersection between the physical and spiritual worlds, but Golding worked his allegory in the intersection between the physical world and the world of the subconscious.

As the American title, The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, implies, the story concerns Christopher Martin’s struggle to survive both physical and metaphysical death. The novel is one of psychological realism, but the main focus of the work is on one person’s ontology, or being, in the world.

The first focus of Martin’s ontological status after the shipwreck is his determination to lighten himself, thus increasing his chances for survival, by removing his seaboots. He believes that he has accomplished this feat, and he begins to hope for survival. His lifebelt, an allegorical symbol for the reality of hope, becomes his next focus. He relies on his lifebelt to hold him above the waters, but as the novel demonstrates, he still takes in enormous amounts of water—amounts that will drown him, though his will to live survives.

It is the focus on this will to live that forms the major drama of the first half of the novel. Martin continues to insist, long after the physical point of death, that he will not die. At first, this will to live engages readers in a sympathetic struggle for survival along with Martin. Readers are enthralled by the drama and can hope, along with Martin, that this will to live will, indeed, save him.

Rescue remains a virtual impossibility through Martin’s psychological survival on the rock. It becomes clear that Martin is obsessed with a fear of death, rather than with being saved by a will to live. This will to live parallels the “will to power” that has influenced questions of the role will plays in the determination of not only life and death but also people’s everyday negotiations with the world.

As important as this struggle of will is for Martin, Golding also makes the point that for the “will to survive” to have any meaning, there must be a point of reference for people to refer to to center their being. This point of reference is at first completely lacking in Martin’s struggle. Shipwrecked at night, with no reference point by which to orient himself, Martin is allegorically cast from and into an amniotic life where external references are lacking. In this opening section of the book, Martin struggles by focusing completely on himself. He becomes his own center to his own universe. His lifebelt—a symbol, as Mr. Davidson says at the end of the novel, of false hope—along with his struggle to...