Lord of the Flies tells us a story about a group of English boys were shot down on a tropical island during a raging war, and their way of life and changes during the time they were on the island. The story itself takes place on an isolated island. A plane has crashed, and it transpires that there are no adult survivors. Two English boys named Ralph and Piggy form the initial focus, as they begin to make sense of their new surroundings. The boys soon find a conch shell and Piggy suggests that Ralph uses the conch as a horn to call for any other survivors who might be nearby. The boys include "biguns"and "littluns" and rapidly divide into two camps headed by Ralph, and another older boy named Jack group that also landed on the island. Ralph is voted in charge and calls everyone together to work toward two common goals, the first being to have fun and the second to be rescued by creating a constant fire signal, to be lit using Piggy's glasses, In the final ,Ralph cries, in mourning for his friend Piggy, his own loss of innocence, and his newfound awareness of the darkness of human nature. Finishing reading this novel ,I find this is really a great novel. First and foremost, I will tell you two themes I have found in this novel.

The important theme of the novel is the conflict between two competing impulses that exist within all human beings: the instinct to live by rules and to value the good of the group on the one hand; and the instinct to gratify one’s immediate desires, to act violently to obtain supremacy over others, and to enforce one’s will on the other hand. The conflict might also be expressed as order vs. chaos, reason vs. impulse, law vs. anarchy, or in any number of other ways, including the more generalized good vs. evil. Throughout the novel, the instinct of civilization is associated with goodness, while the instinct of savagery is associated with evil. Generally, the novel portrays the instinct of savagery as far more primal and fundamental to the human psyche than the instinct of civilization. Moral behavior, in Golding’s view, is often merely a forced imposition of civilization, rather than a natural expression of human individuality. When left to their own devices, the novel seems to argue, people will become cruel, wild, and barbaric. This idea of innate human evil is central to Lord of the Flies.

Another theme is loss of innocence. As the boys on the island progress from well-behaved, orderly children who hope to be researched to cruel, bloodthirsty hunters who have no desire to return to civilization, they naturally lose the sense of innocence that they possessed at the beginning of the novel. The painted savages in Chapter 12 who have hunted, tortured, and killed animals and human beings are a far cry from the simple children swimming in the lagoon in Chapter 3.But Golding does not portray this loss of innocence as something that is done to the children; rather, it results naturally from their increasing contact with the innate evil and savagery within themselves.

What is more, I will present my opinion about the two main characters: Ralph and Jack. Ralph is the athletic, charismatic protagonist of Lord of the Flies. Elected the leader of the boys at

the beginning of the novel, Ralph is the primary representative of order, civilization, and productive leadership in the novel. Ralph’s power and influence over the other boys are extremely secure at first. However, as the book progresses and the group succumbs to savage instincts, Ralph’s position declines precipitously as Jack’s station rises. Ralph’s commitment to civilization and morality is strong, and his main wish is to be rescued and returned to the society of adults. For much of the novel, Ralph is simply unable to understand why the other boys would give in to base instincts of bloodlust and barbarism. The sight of the hunters chanting and dancing is baffling and distasteful to him.

Jack, the strong-willed, egomaniacal boy who is the novel’s prime representative of the instinct of savagery, violence, and power, is the antithesis of Ralph. From the beginning of the novel, Jack desires power above all other things. The first time he encounters a pig, he is unable to kill it. But Jack soon becomes obsessed with hunting and devotes himself to the task, painting his face like a barbarian and giving himself over to bloodlust. The more savage Jack becomes, the more he is able to control the rest of the group. By the end of the novel, Jack has learned to use the boys’ fear of the beast to control their behavior, giving Golfing a chance to explore how religion and superstition can be used as instruments of power. Jack’s love of authority and violence are intimately connected, as each enables him to feel powerful and exalted.

From this novel, we can learn that there is an against between Jack’s order and Ralph’s desire of power. Only Simon got a natural ,unforced goodness.As far as I am concerned, throughout the novel, the civilization is associated with goodness while the savagery is associated with evil.

班级：外09 本1

姓名：张小利

学号：2009304030

 

第二篇：英语专业文献综述 蝇王

Lord Of The Flies----a story about the building of a domineering society

liuJunjun

Golding’s novel Lord Of The Flies has long helds the world fame since the day it was born.The studies of it has never been stopped.It seems to his most successful one.It is equally brilliance as invention and narration…The brilliance of Lord Of The Flies can scarcely be exaggerated, and horrific as it is , it cannot be dismissed, merely as a horror-comic of high literary merit. As a “sick” comment on RM.Ballantyne’s nineteen-century view on the nature of British boyhood. The fact is its apprehension of evil is such that it touches the nerve of contemporary horror as no English novel of its time has done., it takes us with the greatest dramatic power and through the most poignant symbolism, into a world of active, proliferating evil which is seen, one feels , as the natural condition of man and which is bound to remind us of the vilest manifestation of Nazi regression.

Mostly, the novel has been studied in the respect of human nature.

Walter Allen, in his book The Modern Novel has the idea that in this novel Golding is showing us stripped man, man naked of all the sanctions of all the custom and civilization, man as he is alone and in his essence, or at any rate as he can be conceived in such condition.. The whole book is based on the concept of original sin, of the horrifying thinness of civilization, of the fragile barriers that lies between man and regression into barbarism and chaos. He uses his great gift of imagination and narrative to accept, as part of the truth about man and his nature, the realities summoned up in our time in the hysterical nastiness of Nazism and concentration

camp. These, for many of us, remain the most baffling phenomena of our century, the brutally ugly fact it is impossible to be reconciled to but yet has to be faced. There is, however a danger here : the acceptance of the evil displaced in the phenomena as being the fundamental truth about man. It is , it seems to me , a danger most carefully to be guarded against .I am bound to say that for me the general effect of Golding’s novels suggests that he has not done so ,The very intransigence of his work compels the protest against it.

Norton , in his book The Novel Now : A Guide To Contemporary Fiction. He pointed out that the main thesis of all Golding’s novels----the primary of evil and the nearimpossibility of good .Take off the brakes of enforced control and boys , like man will choose chaos rather than order .The good intentions of the few are overborne by the innate evil of the many .Instead of a boy-scout camp we get young savages---painted , naked ,gorging on pig-flesh ,given to torture ,murder ,human sacrifice to false gods ,The title refers to Beelzebub .most stinking and deprawed of all the devils .A child is a stark caricature of a man : he does not , despite Wordsworth and Rousseau and the other romantics who believed in the noble savages , trail clouds of innocent glory : he turns quickly to evil .

Jean . E Kennard in his article William Golding : Islanded also says that the original sin is the main thesis of this novel . Golding sees man as trapped in himself . “islanded” , a condition he appears to believe one inevitably with consciousness of self , with the loss of innocence…All Golding’major characters are men have created the world in their own image , who turns everything into themselves.

If human nature is innately violent and selfish then what hope does Golding offers us ? Not much in Lord Of The Flies . In various interviews and essays he has suggested a possibility of good human actions , imposed by individuals upon themselves .Though he does not talk very optimistically about the likehood of this . Some scholars studies the novel in the social respect.

Steven Marcus ,in his book The Novel Again ,says that Lord Of The Flies is Golding’ most “novelistic” work of fiction .It is also the only recent novel of imaginative originality that he is aware of which implies that society ,insane and self-destroying as it undeniably , is necessary .Despite its striking freshness and seriousness , however ,Golding’s notion of society ,in his novel and in his others , is rudimentary ,restricted ,and strangely abstract .In Golding’s novels society as we know it is largely an idea ,a confused memory recollected in the midst of catastrophe ,which the pre-social and post-social have become the paramount actualities.

Jean . E Kennard in his article William Golding : Islanded comment that although Golding suggests the harmony of an ideal society .He does not indicate any faith in its creation .If man is to be helped , he appears to need the help from the God , represented in his novel , not altogether successfully ,by Simon ,the boy Golding himself has called a saint . More sensitive , more foreseeing than others , Simon has visions and attempts to communicate them to the others , only to be murdered by mistaken as the beast . Raloh should have been weeping for Simin not Piggy…Simon represents for Golding a supernatural world which does not exist . As long as it exists,

then , there must be hope that we can recognize it , unless to Golding’s god we are as flies to wanton boys . First they attempt to establish a government among themselves ,but without the restricts of civilization they quickly revert to primitive savagery . Golding himself says the purpose of the novel is to trace back the defects of the society to the defects of the human nature .

This book is also studied as a fable or allegory.

Frank Kermode ,in his book The Later Golding says that this book , displaces a familiar myth ,that of the Earthly Paradise , which it handles ironically . And as it develops the myth with intricate passion , it alludes implicity Freud and to other conceivable systematic explanations of the phenomena . One might say cautiously that the book has a kind of innocence ,thinking of two things : the later novels , which are more occult ; and Golding’s own view ,since abandoned ,that there is only one true way of reading a novel , and that the author knows it best , and takes upon him the responsibility of ensuring that a good reader can read it in that way.

In his book The Art Of William Golding , Benard S . Oldsey has highly praised Golding about his Lord Of The Flies .He says that each of Golding’s novel is a remarkable imaginative feat ,fertile in invention ,powerful in drama ,suggestive in its richness of literary and mythic overtones…he is not any more likely to follow any school than he is to find one.

About the style of this book , Stanley Edgar in his book The Spire Of Babel says that the book is not accurate in his details of medieval life ,nor is this sort of literal accuracy important to Golding (thus the fire lit with Piggy’s eyeglasses).For his own

amusement .Golding will add an occasional artificial wormhole ,such as spelling “tithe”, “tythe”, but if he wants Roger to mock a statement of Jocelin’s with “big talk” “big talk” is what Roger will say.

Also in his book William Golding : “islanded” Jean E .kennard has also treated this book as a fable . Golding’s ability to create characters which functions both realistically and allegorically is illustrated particularly in this book .It is necessary for Golding to establish the boys as “real” children early in the novel---something achieves through such small touches as Piggy’s attitude to his asthma and the boys’ joy in discovering Piggy’ s nickname --- because his major thesis is , after all , about human psychology and the whole force of the fable would be lost if the characters were not first credible to us as human beings. Increasingly ,though , Golding shows the children responding differently to the same object or even and the highly patterned nature of those episode makes it clearly that the author is intended to read them as allegory…The strength of Golding’ s characterization lies in the fact that while the reader is led out from the reality of individuals to a wider significance his initial sense of real people is not lost .When , for example , as the death of Piggy the recognize this is the death of reason or logic ,he nevertheless retains the sense of horror at a child is being murdered by other children .

The characters function midway between realism and allegory…But in brief snatches of description of dialogue Golding keeps every character functioning on the human level also , even as the reader is beginning to see the allegorical pattern .

Through allegorical characterization Golding makes the reader relate his

microcosmic world of Pincher On The Rock to Christian mythology and through reference to Prometheus to Greek mythology also.

James Stern ,in his book English Schoolboys In The Jungle says that this book is an allegory on human society today .The novel’s primary implication being that what we have come to call civilization , at best ,no more than skin-deep .This brilliant wok is a frightening parody on man’s return to that state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge.

I notice that this novel is written after the World War II ,the Hitler’s domineering government had ruined the world badly and Nazism had left a painful impact on people’ s heart .The author himself has also joined the British army, and experienced the disaster the Hitler’s domineering government has made .This would inevitably reflects in his works .

My idea is that this book can be read at the political view .It can be seen as a story about the development of a society: how this society comes into being; how its power drains away from the majority to one people .The whole book can be read as how a democratic society turns into a domineering society .

My view is based on the past research .The desire for power .for a feeling of control , as the scholar before has studied --- is the evil of human .This evil will lead someone to ruin the rules which has been made and should be obeyed by everyone , and the course of building a domineering society is a course full of murder ,cheating ,and it is a course in which reason is replaced by the innate sin of people .

The reference book

Walter Allen The Modern Novel Dutton 1964

Steven Marcus The Novel Again Partisan View 1962

Frank Kermode The Later Golding in Continuities Random House 1968 Bernard S Oldsey The Art Of William Golding Harcout 1965

Stanley Edgar The Spire Of Babel Horizon 1966

Jean E Kennard William Golding : “islanded” Archon Books 1975

James Stern English Schoolboys In The Jungle The NewYork 1974