spirethemes.htm

'There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately, with a character. That is the service a novel renders.'William Golding, accepting the Nobel prize for literature.

What are the themes in The Spire?

what motivates a visionary?

what are the costs of a vision?

faith vs obsession

sublimation

the sacred and the profane

Christian and pagan

the physical and the spiritual

the loss of Eden

pride and the fall

vision and translation

delusions

the medieval world-view

reason and vision

the journey to self-knowledge

human frailty

a novel about novel-writing

The above are all my suggestions, but I have recently come across these useful suggestions from other readers.

1. I think three main points from it would have to be whether all creation is an act of destruction, whether artists have to be frustrated, unhappy people to succeed, and whether it's better to be a normal man (or woman, but I think it's a novel intensely concerned with masculinity, as much of WG is) or something special and extraordinary - to dare to be different and risk utter failure.

2. Golding plots his novel on the diagram of the cathedral, as it were. Golding's main interest is the construction of human consciousness: what are the unconscious desires of the dean, and why is this the case?

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