Explore how Golding establishes the main themes of the spire through his portrayal of jocelin in chapters 1-5?

Question

Its an essay that has to include narrative structure,narrative voice, jocelin's relationships with others,symbolism/imagery/metaphor and themes

Answer 1

THE SPIRE (1964) was a story about the construction of a cathedral spire. Jocelyn, dean of a cathedral, has decided to erect a 400-foot spire before his death. But its construction causes the sacrifice of others, treachery, and murder. From this novel Golding's work developed into two directions: the metaphysical with the theme of the fable like fall from childlike innocence into guilt, and the social without mythical substructure.
The spire itself and Jocelyn's building of it. In both, we admire the brilliance of the technical achievement (Roger Mason's rather than Jocelyn's in The Spire) while increasingly recognizing the tainted nature of the motive. In both, the furthest point is reached in one sense or another in meeting God.
Martin knows that the being who addresses him cannot be the hallucination which he would like to think it, because it questions the fundamental urge of his personality, to survive at all costs. He claims to "have created you and I can create my own heaven" to which the appalling answer comes "You have created it". Jocelyn, having come to the conclusion -which was sometimes Golding's own -that the urge to create is a need for absolution, sees what he has created as he dies, and cries out in astonishment, "It's like the apple tree!". Father Adam, perhaps Golding's most steel-sheer portrayal of a man of adamant, can interpret that cry at beauty as one of "God! God! God!".