Word: jocelin
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...Jocelin, the dean of the cathedral, at first seems a perfect incipient saint. Unworldly, passionate, sure of God's love, he is imbued with a vision of the spire as a living prayer of praise. His master mason and architect threatens to quit, the cathedral has no real foundation so that the spire, even if built, is likely to fall, his fellows in the cathedral chapter all oppose the plan, but Jocelin will brook no interference. Consumed by his dream he goes into debt, disrupts the services of the cathedral, fills the choir with the blaspheming of dirty workmen...
...finishes his prayer in stone. But is it a blessed victory? Naturally not. Slowly, and then in a landslide rush, Golding undermines the reader's faith in the saintly fool. Soon Jocelin himself is wrestling with the high cost of inspiration, strung taut between the tenter hooks of divine and earthly means. He condones adultery and acquiesces in an accomplished murder to keep the master mason...
Epitaph for Everyman. Before he is done, Golding has stripped Jocelin of every last shred of selfdelusion. Jocelin thought he had, at least, been chosen by God for his post in the cathedral. He finds that the choosers in fact were the king and his paramour (Jocelin's aunt) who pleased the king and asked a favor for her nephew. He thinks his vision of the spire is divinely inspired - but Golding insistently suggests that it may just as well be a phallic sublimation of Jocelin's repressed yearnings for the red-haired wife of a cathedral worker...