Criticism on Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies reveals Golding as the supreme revoker, the most obvious

abrogator in modern literature, employing the dark discoveries of our century

to disclaim the vapid innocence of its predecessor. The target is R. M.

Ballantyne's The Coral Island and Golding points up the ironic contrast

by lifting even the names of his boys from the earlier work. Ballantyne's

book could be used as a document in the history of ideas, reflecting as

it does a Victorian euphoria, a conviction that the world is a rational

place where problems arise so that sensible, decent men can solve them.

God has his place in this world but his adversary is pleasingly absent

and, with him, the sin which is his hold on humanity. (pp. 139-40)

Lord of the Flies was conceived in a very different moral landscape and

Golding himself tells us that the horrors of the Second World War were

crucial in producing this alteration.... Lord of the Flies springs from

the cultural catastrophe of our times and not, as has been foolishly alleged,

from the petty rancor of an arts graduate peeved because the scientists

today have all the jobs and all the prestige. To attribute the book to

a sullen distaste for the contemporary world, to see Golding as another

Jack, who, when he can't have his own way, won't play any more and goes

off in a huff, all because the scientist has displaced the literary intellectual

as leader of society, is dignified by describing it as a niaiserie. But

it does, at least, help us to focus our attention on Golding's attitude

to science. He had started to read science at university on the twin assumptions

that `science was busy clearing up the universe' and that `there was no

place in this exquisitely logical universe for the...

... middle of paper ...

...is an Augustinian or

`tory' book, arguing for law and order against anarchic misrule and licentious

freedom. All of the boys, so it is argued, removed from the pinfold of

civilization, inevitably regress to savagery. But Simon doesn't regress

to savagery; it is in the jungle that he becomes prophet and redeemer,

and it would be foolish in the extreme to argue that he inherits these

roles as a result of a sound education in the Home Counties. Simon is not

one up for civilization in its quarrel with nature. If anything, the beautiful

resumption of his body by the ocean might lend support, here, if nowhere

else, to nature's advocates.

But it is misleading to use him as a counter in the culture versus nature

debate, for he transcends both to become, in the religious sense, a new

creation. Why did Golding create him and why is the hideous death followed?