Eco, Golding’s Rites of Passage and Breaching the Limits of Being

William Golding’s novel Rites of Passage (1980) explores the depths of human experience, absorbed in and struggling against the cognitive, ontological and referential limits inherent in its essence. By portraying Edmund Talbot and James Colley on an equator-crossing voyage to Australia, Golding emphasizes the fact that it is darkness that lies beyond the lines that systemize and limit human existence, which is manifested by Colley’s death. In this way, Rites of Passage comports with Umberto Eco’s theory of ‘contractual realism’, elaborated in Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (1999), in a sense that it asserts that within a framework of a cultural contract, there are certain things that we as human beings are vetoed from doing in our inquiry after the essence of Being. This article provides a thematic examination of William Golding’s novel Rites of Passage in the light of Umberto Eco’s theory of ‘contractual realism’.