William Golding published Lord of the Flies in 1954. It was Golding’s first novel. The novel is steeped in allegory and many draw conclusions about life lessons that can be taught as a result.
Golding rejected the idea that humans can create a utopia. He instead injects the idea of inherent evil in mankind as the driving force for all of life’s injustices and failures to achieve peace on Earth.
The best works tend to inspire our imaginations to see parallels in literature and our reality. This is of course on purpose, by the author. In doing so the author is transcendent. That means he transcends the boundaries of his novel into the time period of the reader, even if that time is centuries beyond its inception.
Golding’s novel is similar to C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia in its Christian theme of the battle of good versus evil. C.S. Lewis wasn’t always a Christian, in fact J.R.R. Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis in a single night.
In Lord of the Flies, Golding tells a story about the mankind’s inherent descent into cruelty through the medium of adolescent schoolboys trapped on a remote island.
Plot
A British airplane carrying adolescent schoolboys crashes near a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Two boys, Ralph and Piggy survive the crash and discover a conch shell which they use to signal other survivors.
Ralph is elected leader by the other boys who survived the crash. Ralph delegates the hunting and foraging for food to another boy named Jack. The group decides to find a way to signal passing ships and airplanes so they agree upon a signal fire on the beach.
Using Piggy’s glasses they concentrate the rays of the Sun on some dry wood and create a fire. However instead of managing the fire, the boys play and the fire gets out of control, burning down part of the forest. In the fire unfortunately a young boy is burned to death.
Life moves on for the boys, now stranded on the deserted island. Ralph is upset that the boys are content playing and believes huts should be built and the signal fire maintained for any hope of rescue.
Jack and his hunters fail to kill a pig. One day a ship passes by the beach, but Ralph and Piggy find that their signal fire has gone out thanks to Jack neglecting it. Jack strikes Piggy in the face in an argument over the fire.
Ralph restores order using the conch shell. The younger boys, dubbed the “littluns”, are now afraid of a shadowy monster living on the island and hiding in the sea or woods.
An air battle above the island, presumably between the British and Nazi airforces, ends with a single pilot parachuting down to the island but dies in doing so. Jack and Ralph investigate the landing and the boys end with a sharp divide between followers of Jack and followers of Ralph.
Jack and the hunters kill a sow and display its head on a stake. Simon has a dream in which the head, the “Lord of the Flies” speaks to him. Simon reappears on the beach, but is killed by the boys in a frenzy believing him to be an attacker.
Ralph and Piggy become targets once again and an older boy crushes Piggy to deal by pushing a boulder down the mountain where Jack has built a stronghold of his own.
With Simon and Piggy dead Ralph flees and is hunted by Jack and the hunters like an animal. Jack orders the forest burned away to uncover Ralph’s hiding. The fire signals a British navy ship and rescues the boys. Ralph is asked by a naval officer what happened. Ralph and the boys weep uncontrollably at what they have done on the island.
Lord Of The Flies Life Lessons
The first Lord of The Flies life lesson is about man’s inhumanity towards mankind. Golding himself said that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”
“Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of society… but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another… I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.” – William Golding
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