LORD OF THE FLIES



LORD OF THE FLIES (1954)

by William Golding

Published in 1954, it was a critical success up the 70s (a cult novel, mockingly called “Lord of the Campus” for its popularity in schools and universities). Now less popular because of its “in the shadow of the atom bomb”, its 1960s “feel”, and its pessimistic world view. It can be seen as a bitter parody of countless 18th and 19th century stories of survival and rescue (Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, 1719; Treasure Island, Stevenson, 1883; Coral Island, Ballantyne, 1858). Golding inverts Ballantyne’s story in a macabre way (in a similar situation the boys of Coral Island follow the Victorian code of morals and keep their sense of society, instituting rational and organizational methods). Golding is reported to have said, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if someone wrote a book about what would really happen if some children were left alone on an island?” “Before the war most Europeans believed that man could be perfected by perfecting his society”. The aim of the novel is didactic: he attacks the liberal optimism of the 20th century. Although he claimed not to have read Heart of Darkness, the novel offers the same philosophical affirmation: that society, without the controlling factors of rationality, democracy and law, becomes a living hell. Golding’s novels are generally moral and metaphysical allegories of the human situation: his main theme is the struggle between good and evil, with evil always predominating. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Plot

A group of children belonging to a church choir find themselves on a desert tropical island after their plane has been attacked and crashes on the ground. At first they enjoy the feeeling of freedom and the charm of nature the new situation offers them. They start organizing their stay by holding democratic elections and blowing a conch to summon assemblies. Ralph is elected a governor of the island, and Piggy, a clumsy fatty boy, who seems very rational, but is constantly mocked at for his appearance, offers his help. Jack Merrydew, instead, is envious and doesn't recognize Ralph's leadership. Their initial tasks are to build shelters and keep a fire going on, so that someone will be able to notice it and maybe rescue them. Fire, a powerful symbol in the novel, goes out of hand and destroys part of the jungle. A kind of foreboding of what is going to happen in the future. The two groups separate as they are moved by opposite interests and impulses. Jack exploits the boys' animal instincts, by inciting them to chase wild pigs and he grounds his leadership on instilled feelings of fear. Apparently the jungle is inhabited by a fearful beast, which Simon will reveal to be only the dead corpse of a parachutist and his floating parachute. Simon, a shy, mystic boy, is doomed to die because, when he is ready to announce his discovery – that the beast is in us, that we are the beast – he will be brutally murdered by the group of the boys who, in a frantic ritual, mistake him for a wild pig. All the boys are involved in the sacrifice, even though they won't admit it.

Now the two groups fight each other, and when Ralph and Piggy go to the Rock to ask for Piggy's spectacles back, a boulder is thrown on him, killing him and smashing his brain. The object of the chase is now Ralph himself who escapes fearing for his life as the hunters led by Jack set fire to “smoke him out”. The ending is paradoxical as the navy officer, who rescues and reproches them for failing to show their Britishness, will take them in a world where an atomic war is still going on.

Structure

The action progresses straightforwardly from their first meeting after the crash to the arrival of the naval officer. Natural descriptions are often metaphorical and give deeper meaning to the boys’ actions. There is a general movement from innocence to guilt, from civilization to savagery, from light to darkness. Four movements have been distinguished:

• Chapters 1-3: the appearance of savagery;

• Chapters 4-6: superstition and fear;

• Chapters 7-9: search for and confrontation with the “Beast”;

• Chapters 10-12: the triumph of savagery and the final rescue.

Simon suggests: “What I mean is...maybe it’s only us”. His death only confirms that his understanding was right. Gradually the symbols of civilization are destroyed: Piggy’s glasses, the shell, Piggy himself. At the end the hunters hunt a human prey. The image of the rise and fall of the tide suggests that the story of the fall of man from the Garden of Eden to a “heart of darkness” is a never-ending one. Despite its characteristics of realism and of adventure story, the novel has the unity of a moral fable.

Characters

The characters are portrayed realistically, as boys who use the jargon of their day and display at times childish behaviour (Jack doesn’t play unless he is the leader, Piggy cannot resist food). The four main characters are: Ralph, Jack, Simon and Piggy. Others are vaguely sketched (Roger, Maurice, Sam, Eric and Percival). All the remaining characters are divided into “biguns” and “littleuns” (Piggy).

RALPH: the hero who is elected the leader of the group; he shows a deep concern for the community, longs for the order and reasonableness of adult civilization and tries to reproduce them on the island. He consults the others for decisions and establishes the habit of handing the conch, so whoever wants to speak will be heard and not interrupted. He puts duty before pleasure, but his obsession for duty will make him less and less popular. He’s ready to acknowledge his mistakes (Simon’s group killing); he represents democracy, humanity and reason. But the situation facing him cannot be solved by a rational approach.

JACK: Ralph’s natural antagonist. An ambitious boy, he will increase his importance by taking advantage of the fear of the Beast. He lets the “littleuns” believe that there is indeed an obscure danger, so that they will need his protection and his tyrannical rule. He lives entirely in the present and scorns Ralph’s rules and concern for the fire. He is charismatic, demagogical, instinctive; for the boys it’s easier to follow him rather than Piggy’s or Ralph’s rationality, which includes work and restraint. When he becomes the leader he gives vent to his sadistic tendencies, with killings and ritual celebrations, exerting his authority and letting his irrational side take total control over him (Kurtz).

PIGGY: he got his nickname because of his appearance. Short-sighted and suffering from asthma, he comes from a working-class environment (whereas the others are upper middle-class), but speaks and acts like a grown-up; this attitude, combined with his clumsy aspect, make him ridiculous and boring. Everyone makes fun of him. Throughout the novel he comes up with practical ideas and wise suggestions, showing his unshakeable faith in reason, science and democracy, and fear of whatever is obscure and cannot be explained rationally. He is also a coward and won’t admit he is wrong; for instance, he minimizes his participation in Simon’s ritual killing.

SIMON: a sensitive, lonely and contemplative boy. Generous and loyal, he is the only one who does not make fun of Piggy. Showing a tendency to faint, he is probably subject to epileptic fits (a feature often coupled with a visionary quality of many mystics and prophets in history). He has prophetic gifts, as when he assures Ralph that he will eventually be rescued. He understands the real nature of the Beast: “Maybe there is a beast...what I mean...maybe it’s only us”. As Piggy is all reason, and therefore spiritually as well as physically short-sighted, Simon is complementary to him, he adds to the novel the dimension of the unknowable and the trascendental.

Language and style

It can be read as a realistic novel concerning children degenerating into little savages or, on a symbolic level, as an allegory revealing the darkness of man’s heart. The language reproduces faithfully the jargon of schoolboys in the 50s, outlining the different personalities of the main characters and their different social backgrounds (Piggy’s Cockney; Ralph’s upper-class, public-schoolboy accent). In the assemblies the language is more formal and imitates grown-up manners. There are also examples of ritual language. We perceive the authorial voice of the narrator in many descriptive passages, sometimes poetic, providing symbols, metaphors and imagery, which illustrate the various stages that this society of children go through (from innocence and optimism - often associated with bright images, to disorder, dirt, decay and darkness). At the end, as hunters and prey are animalized joining the animals of the forest in their flight, the animals’ actions are, instead, described in human terms.

SYMBOLS: the Lord of the Flies (the skull of a sow left as an offering to the Beast) is the translation of the Hebrew word “Beelzebub”, a Philistine divinity, later on, one of the manifestations of the devil; the Beast is present in all children, it’s their capacity for evil. Simon, a Christ-like figure, dies because he has understood it. The conch symbolizes the democratic rule (the assembly) which will eventually get smashed. Piggy with his glasses is the prototype of the intellectual, the rationalist. His glasses, on the one hand, represent reason, which helps light the fire of civilization and is shattered at the hands of dictatorial Jack. On the other, they suggest imperfect vision: Piggy’s common sense leads nowhere, his reason brings no solution. Fire is another symbol which stands for safety, warmth, civilization, food and the possibility of rescue, but, if not controlled, it becomes a destroyer and devastates nature in the same way as untamed human passions can undermine and subvert human rationality.

Themes

Golding, a teacher and a navy officer who witnessed the cruelty of WW2, stages a story which is both realistically and psychologically plausible, and a powerful, apocalyptic allegory of innate evil in the human heart.

Their island is like the Garden of Eden. Then, little by little, they lose their innocence. What the reader discovers, through the character of Simon, is that evil is not something external, but a presence we have in our heart, and that goodness is the result of a constant moral fight.

Leadership, however, is not only a matter of morality and rationality. Jack's success with most of the boys shows that a leader can be much more attractive if he appeals to the children's sadistic, irrational instincts, to the principle of pleasure, rather than boring them with moralistic sermons and tedious rational arguments. Authoritarian leadership can be strengthened by the feeling of fighting a common enemy, by evoking some impending, mysterious danger and by reassuring the children with the promise of protection and safety from the unknown, the “beast” lurking in the dark of the jungle.

In the background there are considerations about the role of leadership during WW2, the attractiveness of totalitarian regimes and the cult of political leaders. The moral reverses the commonplace that the children (whose society in the novel is an allegory of the adult world), like the Good Savage, or the characters in Coral Island, are rational, perfectible creatures. The remote island setting, isolated from urban civilized areas, underlines a theme that can be found in Conrad: man has to face his “heart of darkness” in a situation of isolation where his moral “stuff” will be tested without external protecting filters and rules. Nature, though beautiful and inspiring, is indifferent, it's only a background where to stage the tragedy of human evil. Man may be aware of nature, but nature is unconscious and unaware of mankind.

Evil is part of human nature. The Garden of Eden is doomed to transform itself into Hell. Without restraint the decline from civilization to savagery is inevitable. The island is a microcosm which is meant to represent the macrocosm, as the dead body of the parachutist and the navy officer paradoxically remind us.

Ralph and Jack represent two opposite ways of interpreting the role of a leader, two different ways of conceiving society. Jack’s success reminds us of the failure in recent history of policies based on reason, confronted with the irrational drives and violence of fascism and Nazism. Jack gives the boys what Ralph isn’t able to: “fun and games”, the thrill of adventure, the excitement of bloody rituals:

• When the first pig is killed, Jack boasts, You should have seen the blood!

• The ritual 'dance' revolves around violence: Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in.

• The boys become like wild and savage animals: when Jack hunts a pig he is ape-like; Simon is killed by the tearing of teeth and claws; Ralph becomes like a hunted animal, not a boy, at the end: He raised his spear, snarled a little, and waited.

• The murder of Simon is particularly horrific because it involves all the other boys - they get caught up in the frenzied chant: The crowd ... leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore.

Instead, Ralph’s democratic world is too dull and disciplined. Through peer pressure, hunting will turn into an irresistible collective ritual, which is much more exciting and symbolizes the decline into savagery (even rational, sensible characters like Ralph and Piggy take part in the ritual killing of Christ-like Simon). The naval officer, at the end, is both a rescuer and a reminder that in the wider world an atomic war is still going on, that the darkness in the limited space of the island reflects a cosmic darkness. Golding implies that the long course of evolution has brought no fundamental change in human nature. We are today essentially what we were in the past.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download