FAȚETE ALE UNOR NAUFRAGII: FOC
FACETS OF SHIPWRECKS: FIRE

Summary/Abstract: The essay is a comparative analysis of the function and meaning of fire into three novels dealing with shipwrecks and outcasts: Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Tournier’s Friday, or The Other Island (1967), Coetzee’s Foe (1986). In Lord of the Flies fire is a suffocating, obsessive, assiduous occurence of the internal history; thus it may be looked upon as the main character or at least the central metaphor of the novel (together alongside and opposing the pig head). It formally and consistently performs the major role of signalization in order to be rescued, but other functions are also expressed: of psychological comfort, of a tool for cooking game pigs, of complete destruction of the island (and, implicitly, of life). Around the meaning of fire, two antagonistic, irreconcilable worlds of light and darkness clash, with the inherent victory of the latter. In Friday, or The Other Island, there is a triple functionality of fire: as a tool for cooking food, for psychological relaxation and as a saving signal; none will have an assiduous expression in the pages of the novel. It is transitorily expressed as a way of cooking food, it is quickly abandoned in the logic of the useless saving signal, and the function of psychological relaxation acquires an unexpected valence in the form of the use of the pipe which, accidentally, will trigger a saving explosion.In Foe the only one who seems to maintain the fire (for cooking) is Friday, and thus we find ourselves in the paradigm of the metaphor of the black race kept in ignorance and bluntness, exploited by the white "civilized" race strictly in accordance with material needs, the exploitation of wood for fire being such a mirror construction. But the references to the source and way of maintaining the fire are vague, thereby suggesting the predominant theme of the novel: the impossibility of authentic communication. It is a manifestly incomplete history, awaiting its omniscient and omnipotent author, the one who knows and can make fire, Friday, to be told in full.

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