William Golding's Lord of the Flies

William Golding's Lord of the Flies "In 'Lord of the flies' Golding is clearly seeking to explore

fundamental human nature and this is apparent from the way in which he

portrays the slackening hold of civilisation on the boys can the

consequent atavistic regression. By reversing mankind's evolution, he

strips the boys to their essential nature."

Referring to three episodes in the novel, analyse the boys regression

into savagery and explore what Golding reveals about mankind's

essential nature.

'Lord of the Flies' was written by a man called William Golding and

was first published in 1954 and shocked the nation, as the thought of

the boys killing each other shocked the nation. The basic storyline is

about boys ranging from four to twelve, their plane crashes and they

are stranded on an island where they slowly descend to savagery. The

story mainly focuses on the elder boys, the main characters are Ralph,

Piggy and Jack. The boys live in a world that is in a nuclear war.

Golding was affected by the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima

and this book showed that everyone had this evil and he stressed this

point by making the character's children. Golding believed that

without the hold of civilisation that all humans would descend into

this primal state to survive, but that this evil would also arise.

Golding thinks of the island as a sort of Microcosm of the world as if

trying to warn us what would happen if civilisation were to go

The first episode that I have chosen is one where the character Jack

goes hunting for pigs. We can tell that some time has past b...

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... there are different types of people, those that succumb to their evil

desires or those that resist the evil. It also shows us group

mentality that people can be like sheep or follow those because they

want safety.

Golding wrote this story to have many meanings both moral and

religious. I find myself agreeing with Golding on some aspects of the

novel. I believe that mankind doesn't have an essential illness but

that we do have the ability for great evil but also great good it is

up to us to choose. I think Golding was very clever to use children

instead of adults as this gets his message across to the reader better

then if it was adults because everyone, and especially when this book

was first published, associates children with goodness purity and

innocence. Overall I thought this was a very thought provoking book.