Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Lord of the Flies

Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in direct argument with the Victorian adventure novel, and specifically with R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, whose stranded British boys conduct themselves with admirable imperial virtue. Having served in the Royal Navy during World War Two — having seen the mature, educated, civilized version of what boys become — Golding found Ballantyne's faith in natural English decency not merely incorrect but dangerously naive. His island is what happens when you remove the institutions that keep the thesis from being tested.

The conch that Ralph finds in the lagoon becomes, almost immediately, a symbol of the principle that the boys' survival depends on: whoever holds it has the right to speak, and speaking has the right to be heard. This is a makeshift democracy constructed from found materials, which is more or less what all democracies are, and it works for approximately as long as the boys believe in it. Jack's contempt for the conch is present from the beginning. His contempt is the conch's eventual fate.

Piggy sees everything clearly and is heard by almost no one, which is Golding's observation about the social conditions under which rational intelligence actually operates. His intelligence is real and it is the least protected thing on the island — his glasses are the means by which fire is made, and the community's relationship to his glasses tells you everything you need to know about the community's relationship to his mind.

Simon's understanding of the beast — that it is not something in the water or the jungle but something within the boys themselves, that fear has given their own violence an external address to make it manageable — is the novel's philosophical center, and the novel is not kind to philosophical insight. What happens to Simon is the fullest statement of Golding's thesis: the truth that could free them is destroyed by the same mechanism it was trying to diagnose.

The beast works as a symbol because it works, first, as psychology. Boys who are frightened of the dark will project their fear onto something in the dark. The projection becomes real, or real enough to organize behavior around. The hunting and the rituals and the chanting are not primitive irrationality but perfectly rational responses to a fear that has been given a body — except that the body is their own violence, hunting itself.

The naval officer who arrives at the ending — stepping onto the beach to find the island burning and the boys in ruins — is Golding's most economical irony: the representative of civilization arrives to rescue the boys from savagery, and he has come from a war. The officer is embarrassed by what he sees. Golding's point is that the officer has no right to be.

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