[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-300203-105":59,"doc-detail-300203-en":131},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":124,"head_meta":126,"extra_data":128,"updated_unix":130},105,"en","darkness-visible-part-1-introduction","Darkness Visible - Part 1 - Introduction","","A literary introduction to William Golding’s novel Darkness Visible, emphasizing how its two largely separate strands—Matty’s mystic progression through fire and the twins Toni and Sophy’s monstrous descent—only cohere through the historical pressures of the 1970s. The text frames the work within the late-1970s moment for English fiction, linking it to anxieties about social collapse and genre upheaval. It explores the reader’s central question of identity and the role of society’s fascination with beauty, chance, and an inescapable system that governs outcomes.",{"@graph":69,"@context":123},[70,84,106],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/darkness-visible-part-1-introduction/300203/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/darkness-visible-part-1-introduction/300203.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Ivy","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-24","2026-09-18",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":105},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",11,{"@type":107,"mainEntity":108},"FAQPage",[109,115,119],{"name":110,"@type":111,"acceptedAnswer":112},"What are the two main strands of Darkness Visible discussed in the introduction?","Question",{"text":113,"@type":114},"The introduction highlights Matty’s mystic progress from fire to fire and the twins Toni and Sophy’s monstrous descent, which barely touch in the finished work yet form a compelling unity.","Answer",{"name":116,"@type":111,"acceptedAnswer":117},"How does the introduction place the novel in its historical literary context?",{"text":118,"@type":114},"It describes the late 1970s and early 1980s as a distinctive period in the English novel, shaped by high fantasy, shifting genres, and questions about society seeming to move toward terminal collapse.",{"name":120,"@type":111,"acceptedAnswer":121},"What central question does the introduction say readers ask about Matty and later about Sophy and Toni?",{"text":122,"@type":114},"It begins with the question “What is Matty?” and ends by turning to what Sophy is and what Toni is, treating their surfaces and inner knowledge as crucial to the novel’s meaning.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":125,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":127,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":129,"site_id":62},300203,1790442422,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":132},{"doc_id":129,"user_id":133,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":134,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":135,"file_id":136,"file_url":137,"file_type":138,"file_size":139,"view_count":105,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":140,"language":141,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":142,"faqs":143,"seo_title":144,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":145,"read_time":146},549758252649,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/8000253669c5317157?_k=1778319167496531819","WILLIAM GOLDING  \nDarkness Visible  \nTable of Contents  \nTitle Page  \nEpigraph  \nIntroduction: by Philip Hensher  \nPart One: Matty  \nChapter One  \nChapter Two  \nChapter Three  \nChapter Four  \nChapter Five  \nChapter Six  \nChapter Seven  \nPart Two: Sophy  \nChapter Eight  \nChapter Nine  \nChapter Ten  \nChapter Eleven  \nPart Three: One Is One  \nChapter Twelve  \nChapter Thirteen  \nChapter Fourteen  \nChapter Fifteen  \nChapter Sixteen  \nAbout the Author By the Same Author Copyright  \nSIT MIHI FAS AUDITA LOQUI  \nIntroduction by Philip Hensher  \nDarkness Visible was the novel that gave Golding most trouble in the writing. Although it was published in 1979, Golding’s first thoughts about it are in his notebooks from 1955, as John Carey’s admirable biography records. It has two strands, which hardly touch each other in the finished work – the mystic progress of Matty from fire to fire, and the monstrous descent of the twins Toni and Sophy. Although they form a compelling unity in the final work, it perhaps took the experiences of disaster and destruction in the 1970s finally to bring these two disparate ideas together. It was the one book that Golding would never speak about; it is, in my view, his most powerful achievement.  \nThe late 1970s and early 1980s was an exceptional period in the English novel. The advent of high fantasy, the breakdown and spread of wild genre fiction, and the rise of burning questions about the state of what might have seemed a society in terminal collapse created an extraordinary series of novels in England. A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden and Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers were, in very different ways, trying to make sense of the experience of the century, and of the nation. Darkness Visible, published in 1979 at the end of a long period of murder and terrorism – the Aldo Moro case, the IRA’s shift of its campaign to the mainland, the Red Army Faction in Germany and many other national and transnational groups – tries to make sense of the terrifying breakdown of society, and settles, with unforgettable power, for a rendering of that breakdown.  \nMatty emerges from a fire through which no child should be able to  \nwalk. What is he? But the powers that have created Sophy and Toni are still more atrocious, and only hinted at – there is an appalling scene when their father is asked ‘what he does’ and tells his daughter, with a breakdown of all decorum,‘You want to know? You do? I masturbate.’ The fires that have created Pedigree and his dreadful passions, reaching, unknowingly, for some kind of redemption, remain mysterious. The strands of the novel barely touch. Towards the end of the novel, Matty finds Sophy’s ring, but to her he is only ‘the odd-job man . . . his awful face’. Fido, who works in the same school, ‘appeared never to have seen or heard of him’. Like Zadie Smith’s recent, magnificent NW, the formal separation of the narrative episodes render, in novelistic terms, the breakdown, in connection and sense, of society.  \nThe immediate question for the reader is ‘What is Matty?’ But at the end, we find ourselves asking what Sophy is, and what Toni. Matty’s surface is repulsive and shocking, but he, too, wants to find out what he is – is he an angel? Who does he speak to? Sophy and Toni’s surfaces are anything but shocking; they are beautiful, and their monstrosity goes unchecked and unexamined because of it. Society regards their beauty as alluring, and forgives it anything, until it is too late for forgiveness. ‘Beautiful young ladies’, Goodchild says,‘are not generally considered to stand in need of an understanding of transcendental philosophy on the grounds that they exemplify in themselves all the pure, the beautiful and the good.’ Society gazes at their beauty like Pedigree looking at the beauty of small boys, not interested in what lies beneath – and the author of Lord of the Flies knew very well what could lie within even quite small boys. Society stands in the novel, happy to have its a","cbCaimKJlGRG9ad7","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaimKJlGRG9ad7","pdf",2086986,316,"English","# Table of Contents\n## Part One: Matty\n## Part Two: Sophy\n## Part Three: One Is One\n## Introduction: by Philip Hensher\n## Epigraph\n## About the Author","[{\"question\":\"What are the two main strands of Darkness Visible discussed in the introduction?\",\"answer\":\"The introduction highlights Matty’s mystic progress from fire to fire and the twins Toni and Sophy’s monstrous descent, which barely touch in the finished work yet form a compelling unity.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the introduction place the novel in its historical literary context?\",\"answer\":\"It describes the late 1970s and early 1980s as a distinctive period in the English novel, shaped by high fantasy, shifting genres, and questions about society seeming to move toward terminal collapse.\"},{\"question\":\"What central question does the introduction say readers ask about Matty and later about Sophy and Toni?\",\"answer\":\"It begins with the question “What is Matty?” and ends by turning to what Sophy is and what Toni is, treating their surfaces and inner knowledge as crucial to the novel’s meaning.\"}]","Darkness Visible - Part 1 - Introduction | PDF",1789773428,487]