The Use of Simile in William Golding’s Novel Lord of the Flies

Abstract

The present research attempts to study the use of simile in William Golding‟s novel, Lord of the Flies. It tries to shed light on the author‟s motives behind the use of such a figure of speech (simile). Throughout this study, we hope at laying a finger on Golding‟s overuse of simile in the novel, focusing on its structure and meaning. This research is divided into four chapters. Chapter one presents a general survey on figurative language. Simile, which is our main concern in this inquiry, it is one of these figures. Chapter two provides some theories of simile. Some of these theories are attributed to Fishlov (1993) and Aristotle (1406). Chapter three highlights a critical review of Golding‟s literature, namely some views on Lord of the Flies. Chapter four is the investigation of simile in Lord of the Flies. Some simile markers will be discussed to find out the syntactic structure of simile and its meaning. This chapter sheds light on the reasons behind the use of simile in the novel. The adopted simile model is descriptive and it consists of particular structural and semantic components such as the tenor (T), the vehicle (V), the ground (G), the simile marker (SM) and the topic (Tp). Golding overuses simile in the novel in order to describe his fictional places, his people, their actions and feelings. All in all, this inquiry shows that this linguistic device has a specific function in enriching the language and giving it a special decoration. Finally, this study has given some suggestions that are presented for further research on the subject and for giving the best for the reader