Abstract

Human freedom is highly prized. It is something that people have regularly been willing to sacrifice their lives in order to secure hold on to. Yet, freedom brings with it responsibility and accountability before God. We are responsible for our actions precisely because they do not spring as Trevor Hart believes "out of the blue" utterly undetermined and accidental but "spring from what we are, by a kind of determination quite different from the chains of mechanical causation which determine the behaviour of material things; it is the determination of personal choice.Our choices as persons are affected by a great many things; things concerning the world in which we live, and those others internal to us as particular persons such as our temper, our nature and so on. We are free to choose evil or good but sooner or later we make a wrong choice which costs us our freedom.In this study, we shall use William Golding's novel Free Fall (1959) to shed light on the problem of choice and to explore the inner structure of human sinfulness. Our focus will be on sin (the fall) and personal responsibility. The novel is a confession. It is concerned with the question of how "grace or freedom of will has been lost.Man is a moral creature and when he is in a state of free fall, he is, to use Golding's words, "without a system of values, without adherence to some, one might almost call codified morality, right or wrong ...(He is)like a creature in space tumbling, no up, no down, just in free fall in the scientific sense. As a result, he stumbles over his morals without knowing they are there. He exploits people and then finds with this comes guilt and that he can not be free of right or wrong.

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The article was added to IASJ on 2012-05-25

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