Undecidability of Meaning in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies
This paper unpacks the assumption of inevitable semantic indeterminacy inherent in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, the twin mono-interpreted texts. Moreover, the book about which the paper is written, in turn, becomes his sustained effort to demonstrate how a deconstructive literary theory can enable readers to see inside (or through) a rich and enigmatic text. The method employed is that of qualitative close-reading, and we are particularly attentive to the tendency throughout for dichotomies (innocence/experience, free will/destiny, etc.) to leak into any message it might seem at first possible to deduce. Crucial to my argument is the sense that both novels continue to contest a single authorial meaning, despite their differences. The Alchemist interrogates the quest through dualities: predestination versus free will. Simultaneously, The Lord of the Flies dismantles civilisation versus savagery with a hint that it could be (if a vile one) another kind of social order. Finally, the theory shows that meaning is unstable in itself, which constantly takes place and engages the readers as active partners of sense.
Keywords: Binary oppositions, deconstruction, The Alchemist, The Lord of the Flies, undecidability,
