Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 42

brought out in comic terms. Finally, Swami returns home and to
civilization, and the novel ends with Swami’s staring at the train
which takes Rajam, his alter ego, away from him and to whom he
has just given a parting present. It is also Swami’s farewell to
boyhood, even though the novel ends without any hint at Swami’s
having fully grown up.
In Tom Sawyer, we see the symbolic absorption o f evil when
Tom and Huck come home triumphant after the death of the
criminal, and Tom becomes a rich man. The mock funeral is also
only symbolic o f the death of childhood, but the children reassert
themselves when they reappear in the middle o f the services. “Tom
grows up. Mark Twain recognizes the importance o f his having
done so in his epilogue, in which he remarks that ’it being strictly
a history o f a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go on much
further without becoming the history o f a m an’.’’ (Rubin 185) In
Lord o f the Flies, as we have already said, Ralph’s dream world o f
fear is dissolved in its very intensity. He cries for mercy and is
greeted by the naval officer, symbolizing the adult world, and the
trim cruiser in the distance waits to take them home.
All three of the novels thus show the child to be the father of
the man, though in slightly different senses. In Narayan and Twain,
the spirit o f freedom in the child is celebrated, and the children
acquire a moral sense through adventure, whereas in Golding the
child becomes an archetype of the sinful nature of man. But even
that is brought out only as a kind of play. Fantasy plays a crucial
role in all three novels. The authors almost identify themselves
with the world of children who find fulfillment through fantasies
but the structure provided by fantasies is in tune with the ritualistic
dimension of the theme o f initiation and thereby enhances their
universality. O f these, Swami and Tom are as much cultural
archetypes as they are universal symbols: Swami is more homebound than the others and Tom ’s search for adventure is as much

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