Human in a Dystopian World: The Approaches of W. Golding and C. McCarthy

The article compares the views of the English writer W. Golding and the American novelist and playwright C. McCarthy on the human in a dystopian world. This work is relevant due to the undying interest in this genre and the lack of research on this topic. It is possible to compare the novels Lord of the Flies by W. Golding (1954) and The Road by C. McCarthy (2006), since in both the works the main characters are children / a child, and one of the key themes is the theme of road / movement. The chronotope of these novels is si­milar: the authors do not specify neither the cause of the catastrophe, nor the time of the events; the past is represented by a series of flashbacks. The space in the texts is limited and mainly cha­racterized by words from the same thematic groups. The characters, finding themselves in extreme conditions, almost completely lose their humanity and, in their behavior, are likened to animals.

However, the authors’ views on the human are different. According to W. Golding, the good constantly struggles with the evil within a person, and you can cope with the evil beginning, if only controlled by some restraining public settings. C. McCarthy believes that love helps people to preserve humanity. In order to fully reveal their own vision of the topic, both the writers resort to a symbolic interpretation of the fire, which W. Golding transforms from a tool of salvation into a means of destruction, and C. McCarthy, on the contrary, makes it a means of not only guaranteeing physical survival, but also helping to preserve the soul and faith.

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