Title: Lord of the Flies: Overview

Novel, 1954

Author(s): Virginia Tiger

British Writer ( 1911 - 1993 )

Other Names Used: Golding, William Gerald;

Source: Reference Guide to English Literature. Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick. 2nd ed. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Work overview, Critical essay

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1991 St. James Press, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text:

William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the Robinson Crusoe of our time, enjoys—like the earlier island story of shipwreck and survival—a pre-eminent place in cultural lore. Both cultural document and modern classic, the novel has provoked enormous critical attention at the same time as it has prompted great general interest—and has sold millions of copies. An obdurate and uncompromising fable about how boys—very British boys—will be beasts if the constraints of authority are withdrawn from their closed world, Lord of the Flies has proved to be a literary and popular success, known and discussed beyond the confines of the academy: two feature film versions of the book have been produced and the book may well be the most internationally taught of contemporary novels. It has also, like its author, been ``endlessly discussed, analysed, dissected, over praised and over faulted, victim of that characteristic 20th-century mania for treating living artists as is they were dead,'' as the novelist John Fowles once observed. In fact, Golding's first novel is not nearly so long as the critical commentary it has spawned.

The story itself is by now familiar. A group of schoolboys, educated by British public schools in a system designed to control an empire, are dropped on an edenic island in the Pacific Ocean. There they confront the task of survival. First the boys proceed to set up a pragmatic system based on a ``grown-up'' model: government, laws, shelters, plumbing facilities, and food supplies. Quickly, however, the society disintegrates under the dual pressures of aggression and superstition. Signal fire becomes defensive hearth, then ritualistic spit; nighttime darkness becomes monstrous ``beast'' to be propitiated by totemic pig heads. Hunting becomes killing as Jack's hunters break loose from Ralph's fire-keepers to form a tribal society with gods, rituals, and territory at the island's end. When two boys from the original group invade this territory they are killed, Simon ritually as a totemic beast and Piggy politically as an

enemy.

Finally a scapegoat, Ralph, is hunted down so as to offer his head to the Lord of the Flies, when the adult world intervenes in the person of a naval officer. The fable concludes with the pathetic image of the survivor, 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.'' And yet ``[h]ow romantically it starts!,'' wrote E.M. Forster, his 1962 introduction to Lord of the Flies being influential in establishing Golding the unfashionable allegorist, writing from deep religious convictions about mankind's essential depravity. He ``believes in the Fall of Man...."his attitude approach[ing] the Christian; we are all born in sin, or will all lapse into it.'' But the text itself bears no such single or stable meaning, a matter made evident by its susceptibility to a range of critical interpretations: religious, philosophical,

sociological, psychological. As moral fable, it examines individual disintegration; as political fable it explores social regression, while as mythic fable it offers an account of prelapsarian loss. Other readings seem equally pertinent. Using the lens of Freud's Three Essays on Human Sexuality or Totem and Taboo opens Lord of the Flies to a reading where the boys become representative of various instincts or amoral forces. In anthropological terms, the boys' society could be seen to mirror the societies of prehistoric man; theirs seems a genuine primitive culture with its own gods, demons, myths, rituals, taboos. Then again, viewed from the position developed by Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil, Lord of the Flies can come into focus as a dystopia, showing how ``intelligence (Piggy) and common sense (Ralph) will always be overthrown in society by sadism (Roger) and the lure of totalitarianism (Jack).''

``[I]sn't it cracking an opusculum with a critical sledgehammer?'' the author was later to remark in response to these abstract accounts, ones that so often obscured the book's primary strength. For Lord of the Flies is first and foremost a gripping adventure story about English schoolboys, related ironically—indeed, subversively—to another boys' story, R.M. Ballantyne'sThe Coral Island (1857). Lord of the Flies' main characters are, like Coral Island's, named Ralph and Jack—though Ballantyne's third character, Peterkin, is split into two boys: Peter and Simon. Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, Ballantyne's boys lead prosperous lives whereas Golding's boys progressively deteriorate. When at the end a naval officer, surveying the hideous children before him, remarks: ``I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you're all British aren't you—would have able to put up a better show than that—I mean ..."Like the Coral Island''), the intertextual allusion is more than ironic. For Coral Island functions throughout as an embedded narrative; by recasting the

19th-century tale from a post-World War II perspective, Lord of the Flies

refutes conceptions of the civilized child and—by extension—the civility of men.

Such a revisionary strategy informs other narrative features, ones characteristic of Golding's subsequent fictional practice: the

distinctive use of visual symbol where significance is saturated in and sutured to naturalistic detail, the coda reversal with its point of view on events contradicting initially established expectations; the habit of delayed disclosure; the method of interlocked design where chapter, episode, character, description, internal allusion, motif, and image pattern are integrated so meticulously that they reflect back thematically upon one another.

Present as well in the figure of Simon is a feature of Golding's work that has remained—despite charges of allegorical reductiveness—a stubborn conception in the Golding mythopoeia: the holy fool. Forerunner to Pincher Martin's Nat, Darkness Visible'sMatty, or Rites of Passage's Parson Colley, Lord of the Flies'unsimple Simon comes to be wise. Sitting before the Lord of the Flies, a stinking, fly-ridden pig's head on a stick, Simon recognizes in human nature the real beast. Simon is then ritually murdered, meeting the fate of those who remind society of its own complicity. The ritual enacts the confinement and destruction of the boys' own terrors; they kill Simon as a beast, his death momentarily exorcising their fears. Piggy's death marks the inadequacy of the rational, logical world: the symbolic conch is smashed as the blind Piggy falls into the sea. Ralph alone remains, to be hunted down as fire sweeps through the island, thus signalling the naval ship and bringing about the schoolboys' rescue. Rescue is always ironic, so the contemporary sensibility records, and Lord of the Flies has complied. As a text interrogative of its time, Lord of the Flies has meant many things to many people. Golding himself insisted upon one theme—one so transformed by the resonance of the fiction that it resists any allegorical abstraction. Lord of the Flies declared its author is ``about grief. Grief, grief, sheer grief.''

Source Citation

Tiger, Virginia. "Lord of the Flies: Overview." Reference Guide to English Literature. Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick. 2nd ed. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. Literature Resources from Gale.Web. 4 June 2012.

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