Lord of the Flies
(1954)
William Golding: man's Innate evil
William Golding was born in Cornwall, the son of a
schoolmaster in 1911. He studied Science and then English
Literature at Oxford University. Here he published a book of
poetry and after working with small theatre companies, he
became an English teacher in Salisbury and got married. He
joined the Royal Navy in 1940, serving throughout the rest
of the Second World War, and taking pare in the historic
D-day landings in Normandy, which marked the beginning
of the liberation.
The effect of the war on Golding were enormous and
contributed to create his pessimistic view of human nature:
he recognised that the war had shown him all the
horrendous cruelties of which man was capable. After the
war Golding returned to teaching and published his first
novel. Lord of the flies (1954) made into a film by Peter
Brook in 1963 and by Peter Hook in 1990. The success of his
first book encouraged him to follow it quickly with other
similarly original and distinctive novels. The inheritors
(1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959) and the
widely
acclaimed The Spire (1964). There was a pause in
Golding's literary production until 1979 when he
published Darkness Invisible. The Rites Of Passage (1980),
The Paper Men (1984). Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down
Below (1989). In 1983 he was awarded the
A
Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1993.
1. While reading fill in the table below. Then use the information you h a v e g a t h e r e d to
organise your knowledge about the author's life and work.
Family Education
Important experiences Masterpiece
Reputation
The plot
A plane crashes on a desert island in the Pacific or Indian
Ocean; the only survivors are a group of schoolboys aged
between six and twelve. At first they set up a rational society
based on a "grown-up" model; they establish a government
and laws under the leadership of Ralph, Simon and the
short-sighted Piggy; shelters are built and food supplies are
arranged. Yet almost immediately this society disintegrates:
the boys, under Jack's influence, go bade to a savage
existence based on hunting and fear of the
"It was dark, there teas that - that bloody dance.
There was lightning and thunder and rain. We
Were scared!"
"beast", that is
* a* dead man, a casualty from the war
outside and above the island, his corpse tangled in his defective
parachute. After killing an enormous sow, that is an adult
female pig, Jack cuts its head off and puts it on a stake
transform nig it into a kind of god, the Lord of the Flies. Two of
the boys are killed, one (Simon) ritually as a totemic beast and
the other (Piggy) politically as an enemy. Finally a sacrificial
victim (Ralph) is hunted down, but the fire of the jungle is seen
by a naval ship and an officer conies a shore and all the boys
are rescued and taken back into society. The fable ends with the
pathetic image of Ralph crying for the end of innocence, the
darkness of man's, heart, and the fall through the air of the
true, wise friend called Piggy.
The setting
This novel takes place on an island during World War II.
This is. important because the isolation forms a sort of
civilization and community. At the same time, the island
lacks a real society and the boys are allowed to run wild and
show their true, ugly, inner selves. Since the island is a
microcosm, Golding uses it to reflect his own world and give
comments on it and his view of human nature.
Symbolic characters
All the characters exist on two levels: as individuals and as
symbols for aspects of human nature. Ralph.
who is 12, fair-haired, handsome and cheerful, stands
for reason, democracy and civilisation. He is elected to
govern the island, to organise the building of shelters and a
possible rescue. As the organisation increasingly breaks down,
since the boys gradually yield to dirt, laziness and cruelty, he
fails as a leader because the situation facing him cannot be
solved by a rational approach. In the end, hunted by the others,
he turns front leader into victim and recognises the failure of
that kind of human moderation he embodied.
Jack, who represents violence and instinct, is Ralph's
natural antagonist; he is the leader of his choir group.
whose members turn into hunters. He becomes
bloody-thirsty and thinks of nothing but killing; in fact the
victims of the sacrifices he makes to the "beast" are, at first,
pigs, then human beings.
Piggy, Ralph's most loyal supporter, is- physically unfit.
Since he is fat, astigmatic and short-sighted, he is the voice
of rationalism; he believes in the possibility of rescue by the
adult society and in the values of civilisation. His death
represents the triumph of Jack's irrationality and evil over
rationality.
Simon stands for intelligence and sensitivity. He is
the only one of the boys who approaches closely
enough to understand what they fear: during the
confrontation scene he actually sees the "beast"
and recognises that it is a dead man. a casualty
from the war outside and above the island, his
corpse tangled in his defective parachute. Running
to proclaim his discovery to the others, Simon
stumbles into the pig while the others, led by the
choir, are enacting the 'kill the pig' ritual.
Symbolic objects
Even some objects are charged with symbolic
meaning. The fire becomes the symbol of
destruction, while a white shining shell, used by
the children lo call on an assembly, stands both for
authority and order. Piggy's glasses are another
symbol: they symbolise knowledge and insight;
while Piggy wears them, he is able to give advice to
the group, but when die glasses are broken, the
group loses the positive insight. The war paint on
the boys' faces is also a symbol; it symbolises the
rejection of society: when they put on the mask of
war paint, they take off the mask of society and
reveal their true inner savagery. The skull of the
sow, made black by die flies that cover ii. becomes
both a token of a sacrificial victim and the emblem
of die forces of evil.
Structure
The novel is written in the third person; although
the book generally follows Ralph, it occasionally
breaks off and follows another character for a time.
This entire
book is autobiographical since it tells us
something the author wants to show us.
The language is a remarkable blend of the
abstract, the symbolic and the concrete. On one
hand, [here is the jargon of schoolboys in the
1950s, and on the other, when the author voices
the children's thoughts or explains the meaning
of their actions, the language is full of symbols
and imagery.
Man's evil nature
During the 19th century and the early part of
the 20th, people believed that they had created
a social order which enabled the basic good in
human beings to flourish; they accepted Jean
Jacques Rousseau's views to mean that man is
born good
and that it is the experience of society that
corrupts him. World War I disturbed this view
somewhat, but they argued that people would
learn from that experience and never go to war
again. The holocaust of World War II shattered
this certainty. Like many people after the war,
Golding found difficult to believe that
reasonable people could be capable of the
atrocities perpetrated against the Jews by the
Nazis, and in Lord of the Flies he tried to explore
and understand why people who are
supposedly civilised can embrace evil.
Therefore the main theme of the novel is an
attempt to trace the defects of society back to the
defects of human nature. The moral is that the
shape of a society must depend on the ethical
nature of the individual and not on any political
system.