WILLIAM GOLDING

  • novelist of the 20th century
  • investigation of the nature of evil and the darkness of the human heart
  • the period (the Second World War) transforms Golding in a moralist: “Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man” than he understands “man was sick”
  • deeply pessimistic view of human being and behaviours (especially in the 20th century)
  • wrote the novel Lord of the Flies in 1954
  • he chose the form of the fable (tale with a moral), telling also an adventure story to render it less didactic
  • the theme of the novel “is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature”
  • he wanted to reverse the message conveyed by The Coral Island(1857) by R. M. Ballantyne
  • the novel was about a group of boys shipwrecked on a desert island, living a civilised and disciplined life.

Lord of The Flies by William Golding

During a nuclear world war, a group of boys are evacuated from their school. Their plane crashed on a desert island. Two of them (Ralph and Piggy) found a shell, which they used as a trumpet to summon the others, who elected Ralph as their leader. Law and order were undermined by Jack, the leader of the choirboys, who represents violence and destruction. Jack and his boys killed a wild pig and fixed its head on a stick as an offering to the Beast. As a matter of fact they started to feel the presence of evil, which they called the “The beast”.
Simon, a lonely and sensibly boy, said the Beast was “only us”, but the other laughed him down. While he was exploring the jungle, he came across the fly-infested pig’s head, called the Lord of the Flies.
The extract is about the dialog between Simon and the Lord of the Flies.

  • There is no beast in the jungle
  • Evil exists inside man’s nature
  • We cannot kill “our evil”
  • We ourselves generate the evil in the world
  • The “real evil” is a moral one, the darkness in the human heart
  • He created believable human beings as symbols for aspects of human nature
  • Characters have a symbolic level of meaning:
  • Ralph = fair play, democracy and civilisation
  • Simon = intelligence and sensitivity
  • Jack = savagery and blood-lust
  • Piggy = rationality
  • the Conch = fairness and democracy
  • Island = the Garden of Eden