Pincher Martin

“His mind inside the dark skull made swimming movements long after the body lay motionless in the water.” 

Given the narrative’s metaphysical nature and the ways in which the brain copes with trauma, this quote initially reads as depicting a man who draws on stores of psychological will to survive even if his limbs are too weak and cold to follow the brain’s instructions. However, in the context of the novel’s conclusion, the quote stands out as the earliest—and arguably the most obvious—clue that Martin has been dead since the U-boat attack. Additionally, in introducing the notion of the brain and body as separate entities, the quote explains in a practical sense how Martin, though his body is dead, could inhabit an imagined world for what he perceives as many days.

“He had a valuable thought, not because it was of immediate physical value but because it gave him back a bit of his personality. He made words to express this thought, though they did not pass the barrier of his teeth. ‘I should be about as heavy as this on Jupiter.’”

Martin’s most important survival tool is his capacity to cling to his personality. That he thinks of gravity’s effect on his body weight at a moment of severe physical distress proves to him that his identity remains intact despite his suffering enormous trauma. This is a natural impulse; after all, the best way to avoid self-negation is to remain keenly aware of oneself. However, in Martin the impulse is an extension of his self-obsession, which highlights how the will to survive can spring from a more toxic source than mere self-preservation.

“There was a name missing. That name was written on the chart, well out in the Atlantic, eccentrically isolated so that seamen who could to a certain extent laugh at wind and weather had made a joke of the rock.” 

This quote strongly suggests that the islet where Martin lands is Rockall. A 50-foot-tall natural granite structure, 300 miles off the coast of Scotland’s St. Kilda archipelago, Rockall is essentially uninhabitable except to sea snails and other small marine invertebrates. That the sailors joke about its name is likely a reference to the word Rockall’s verbal similarity to an offensive British phrase meaning “nothing.”

“His body was in some other place that had nothing to do with this landscape.”

Again, the author introduces many clues that—in the context of the novel’s conclusion—clearly suggest that Martin’s survival adventure occurs entirely in his mind. His ability to live in his head, where he can deny the reality of physical pain, may be an effective short-term survival technique. However, this denial ultimately leads to insanity—not only on the rock but also in his civilian life before the war, when his inability to accept circumstances as they are leads him to rape Mary and try to murder Nathaniel.

“And curse the bloody Navy and the bloody war.”

This is one of the earliest and strongest indications that Martin is not a traditional soldier-protagonist and that this is not a traditional survival narrative. Given that war and survival stories typically invite readers to inhabit the protagonist’s pain, readers naturally tend to sympathize and to imagine themselves in the characters’ shoes. However, Golding subverts that process by depriving Martin of qualities like bravery and valor. This subversion only intensifies as the reader learns that Martin is more than just a coward; he is a rapist and attempted murderer.

“He was too witless to understand that the huddled mess-deck was so dense as to ensure a form of privacy, like that a man can achieve in a London crowd.”

Even—or especially—when people surround him, Martin feels profound loneliness. He feels no kinship with his fellow sailors despite their shared ordeals, and he’s equally incapable of building strong relationships with his civilian colleagues, at least two of whose wives or girlfriends he slept with. Although the source of Martin’s misanthropy remains unclear, the author implies that it stems from childhood trauma pertaining to his mother.

“They were not like the man-wary gulls of inhabited beaches and cliffs. Nor had they about them the primal innocence of unvisited nature. They were wartime gulls who, finding a single man with water round him, resented the warmth of his flesh and his slow, unwarranted movements.”

The phrase “wartime gulls” invokes an image of the natural world as an extension of the war’s violence and terror. This is another expression of Martin’s misanthropy, as the gulls represent his hatred of humanity. On inhabited beaches—in a crowd, as it were—the gulls are rightly afraid of humans. Having seen what humanity is capable of in wartime, they’re angry and resentful. The only scenario in which the gulls—and, by extension, Martin—do not hate humanity is in a state of total ignorance toward its existence. This return to “primal innocence” is attractive to Martin, suggesting that his brain invented the deserted rock with some purpose.

“Take us as we are now and heaven would be sheer negation. Without form and void. You see? A sort of black lightning destroying everything that we call life.” 

According to Martin’s unreliable narration, this is the subject of Nathaniel’s lecture. Though open to interpretation, the quote implies that individuals like Martin are so self-obsessed that they cannot accept heaven because it involves a negation of the self. Their commitment to self-preservation would lead them to reject paradise rather than accept the self’s natural end. Thus, the author depicts an aversion to death as strong as Martin’s to be both selfish and self-defeating.

“I don’t claim to be a hero. But I’ve got health and education and intelligence. I’ll beat you.”

Martin’s will to survive is strong—but not because he has anything to live for. As he endures pain, cold, heat, starvation, and sickness, he doesn’t think of those who love him or what he might contribute if he survives. Rather, he considers only his superiority in body and mind, seeking to validate his ability to conquer the elements. His worldview is so adversarial that he can think of nature only as an enemy he must beat—and of his victory as an end in and of itself.

“The end to be desired is rescue. For that, the bare minimum necessary is survival. I must keep this body going. I must give it drink and food and shelter. When I do that it does not matter if the job is well done or not so long as it is done at all. So long as the thread of life is unbroken it will connect a future with the past for all this ghastly interlude.” 

Martin fears nothing more than “the thread of life” being broken. One could call his approach to survival pragmatic, though he also views his body with a sense of detachment, as if it’s a mere machine that requires only food, water, and shelter. This spiritual emptiness is not unique to Martin’s time on the rock but an extension of his life as a civilian and a sailor, reflecting an exclusively materialistic view of existence.

“In normal life to talk out loud is a sign of insanity. Here it is proof of identity.”

Once again, Martin emphasizes the importance of identity to survival. With nothing emotional or spiritual to live for, he views self-preservation as its own end and therefore must cling tightly to his personality—even if it expresses itself in largely trivial ways. The quote also conveys the author’s layered depiction of sanity. Given that Martin’s body is floating in the sea, the mere fact that he believes he’s on solid ground signifies insanity. Therefore, when he begins hallucinating and losing his grip on a “reality” that exists only in his mind, he arguably grows more, not less, sane.

“The thing that could not examine itself danced on in the world behind the eyes.” 

This quote aptly distills Martin’s broader problem: His desire to preserve himself merges uncomfortably with an inability to examine even his most violent impulses, including his rape of Mary and his attempted murder of Nathaniel. These images arise unbidden when he’s trying to sleep or in the throes of fever. His inability—or refusal—to confront the truth of his nature reaches its limits when his brain won’t even accept the fact that he’s lying dead in the ocean.

“I am busy surviving. I am netting down this rock with names and taming it.”

Martin views conquest as synonymous with survival. To endure, he must view the rock as an adversary bending to his superior will. This is an extension of toxic impulses in Martin’s personal life, such as viewing women like Mary as objects to conquer. Moreover, he sees men like Nathaniel, who succeed where he fails, as affronts to his presumed superiority that he must eliminate to preserve his self-worth.

“And of course eating with the mouth was only the gross expression of what was a universal process. You could eat with your cock or with your fists, or with your voice. You could eat with hobnailed boots or buying and selling or marrying and begetting or cuckolding.” 

Appetite is central to Martin’s materialistic worldview. While most see eating—at its most fundamental level, at least—as a survival necessity, Martin views it as the imposition of his will over another. Thus, he compresses eating, violence, and sex into a single impulse without ties to spiritual or moral concerns. Consequently, he must view his survival on the rock in adversarial terms, imbuing it with a will of its own that he must conquer.

“Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defence must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness.”

In a rare moment of relative honesty with himself, Martin acknowledges that the “personality” to which he clings so strongly is merely a defense mechanism against harsh truths. One might imagine him clinging to this bundle of rationalizations and justifications just as stubbornly in his everyday life and—even before becoming marooned—struggling to keep violent memories and impulses from intruding on his slumber.

“You are all a machine. I know you, wetness, hardness, movement. You have no mercy but you have no intelligence. I can outwit you. All I have to do is to endure. I breathe this air into my own furnace. I kill and eat.”

Once again, Martin equates survival with dominance and eating with killing. Everything is a match of wills for him: He anthropomorphizes the rock as an adversary personally working to destroy him. Lacking a spiritual center or connection with humanity, he has only his toxic resentment to draw on in his survival efforts.

“I am who I was.”

In Martin’s mind, this is an affirmation that his identity remains intact despite the rock’s efforts to obliterate him. However, to the reader, it’s the mantra of a wretch who, full of angry resentment and fixating only on material needs, is merely an exacerbated version of who he was before washing up on the rock. The main distinguishing feature between then and now is that his toxicity now has physical expression: A filthy, overgrown visage and emaciated form replaces the once-handsome face and robust body.

“But there were other people to describe me to myself—they fell in love with me, they applauded me, they caressed this body, they defined it for me. There were the people I got the better of, people who quarrelled with me. Here I have nothing to quarrel with.”

This quote reveals the fragility of Martin’s self-identity. Because he lacks a moral or spiritual center, all that defines him as a human being are other people’s perceptions of and interactions with him. Although he mentions those who “fell in love with me,” he tellingly doesn’t say he loved them back. Moreover, most of these identity-defining moments come as shallow praise on the stage or in the bedroom—and especially from individuals he’s wronged.

“Sanity is the ability to appreciate reality. What is the reality of my position? I am alone on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic.” 

Once again, the author’s definition of sanity is intricate and layered. To Martin, acknowledging his dire position on a rock in the Atlantic is a sign of sanity and maturity. His mental state, a complex scaffolding of rationalizations and realizations, obscure the truth: that he is lying dead in the ocean. He confronts this truth only when he allows “insanity” to fully overtake him.

“If one went step by step—ignoring the gap of dark and the terror on the lip—back from the rock, through the Navy, the stage, the writing, the university, the school, back to bed under the silent eaves, one went down to the cellar. And the path led back from the cellar to the rock.” 

The author never details what happened to Martin in the cellar. Nevertheless, he frames the cellar as an arena where some foundational trauma occurred that shaped Martin’s angry, violent, and resentful personality. The references to an older woman in the cellar, along with passages suggesting unresolved maternal issues, implies that the trauma relates to his mother. Perhaps the narrative deliberately avoids its exact nature to better universalize Martin’s experiences.

“There is always madness, a refuge like a crevice in the rock. A man who has no more defence can always creep into madness like one of those armoured things that scuttle among weed down where the mussels are.” 

The “armoured things” to which Martin refers are the lobsters, which fill him with inexplicable loathing at various points. Thus, the novel’s title takes on two meanings. The first is a reference to various traditional nicknames for British sailors, such as “Pincher” for those with the last name “Martin” (or “Knocker” for those with the last name “White”). Secondly, Martin considers himself akin to a lobster: He likens its armored plating to his personality’s protecting him from harsh realizations and its claws to his voraciously grabbing that which belongs to others to satisfy his appetites, sexual and otherwise.

“That’ll teach you to chase me! That’ll teach you to chase me out of the cellar through cars and beds and pubs, you at the back and me running, running after my identity disc all the days of my life! Bleed and die.”

Martin screams this while stabbing at the pile of rocks that formed “the Dwarf,” which he later took to calling “the old woman.” This strongly suggests a maternal trauma that haunts him no matter what he does or where he goes. Its nature is unclear; it may involve physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or may be less defined, like a real or perceived lack of maternal love. Ultimately, the issue may be moot because the author withholds this information from the reader. What’s important is that Martin’s behavior and personality stem from a traumatic childhood experience.

“There was nothing but the centre and the claws.” 

As Martin’s fantasy crumbles around him, only “the “centre and the claws” ultimately remain. The centre is Martin’s ego, the engine of his fantasy, which struggles mightily throughout the narrative to prevent its host from realizing that he’s dead. The claws, meanwhile, are Martin’s appetites, which the narrative frames in opposition to the rock as part of a battle of wills. Thus, the centre finds itself fighting against the claws as they try to conquer the rock, because doing so will destroy the centre’s carefully constructed fantasy.