What makes for a good read? The stories you can relate to or the ones you wish were real? As you read, do you picture yourself as one of the story's characters? Or is it more like watching a film in your head?

Of course, all of these questions - indeed, the whole premise of what makes a good read, are subjective. An avid reader myself, I can confirm that my reading tastes have changed dramatically over the years. And some people don't even like to read for pleasure. Still, regardless of the type of reader you are, any story should contain particular elements:

  • a storyline: in The Lord of the Flies, it's how a group of boys manage their existence when stranded on a deserted island
  • evocative characters: Piggy, Jack and Ralph, just to name a few
  • plot twists, to keep things interesting: no matter how civilised, Golding shows us how quickly humanity can devolve
  • themes: Golding's work causes us to consider the need for empathy, civilisation's strictures and the loss of innocence
  • symbols: the conch stands for power, the beast represents fear and Piggy's glasses
  • denouement

William Golding artfully wove a tale of boys gone wild based on his observations of how hooligan acts his own students carried out. But we're missing so much of his original story! Maybe that's why the work's reception was only lukewarm when first published. And we're being generous in saying that. Its first 3000 copies didn't exactly fly off the shelf. Let's try to figure out why.

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The Lord of the Flies: Overview

The Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of British schoolboys marooned on an island in the Pacific. The aeroplane on which they are travelling crashes into the jungle.  Isolated from society and freed from adult supervision, the characters in the story quickly lose their civilised manners. They begin to act with surprising violence and savagery.

Golding, who wrote the story while working as a teacher, held strong views on the nature of innocence and the power of civilisation. He believed those trappings should control the savage beast that dwells within us all.  His portrayal of boys, drawn from his experience, has given the book worldwide recognition. The startling and ultimately pessimistic exploration of human nature created a lasting influence on thinkers, writers and filmmakers.

The title is a translation of the Biblical name, Beelzebub. This god, associated with the god Baal of the Canaanite religion, expected human sacrifice. More tellingly, Beelzebub was the god of envy and gluttony. Those are two dangerous themes Golding hints at but doesn't directly address in this work.

Themes In The Lord of the Flies

Most discussions of the book centre around polarised concepts that arise from the boys’ actions. For example, innocence and the loss thereof, civilisation and savagery, and diversity versus conformity. And then, there are the totemic objects that represent bigger ideas: the conch, Piggy’s glasses, and the beast.

This book resonates because of the graphic nature of the acts Golding describes. Unlike John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Golding seemingly casually writes about murder, torture, bullying and hallucination. Another reason it is so riveting is his willingness to explicitly discuss the morality of these acts in his narrative voice. But was he truly willing? We'll tackle that question later in this article. For now, let's examine let's look closely at the themes he presents.

A greyscale image of a pair of glasses with the branches broken off laying on a wooden surface which has been marked by graffiti.
Though broken, Piggy's glasses were still quite powerful. Photo by J. E. Schoondergang on Unsplash

Innocence

When first arriving on the island, the boys seem almost entirely innocent. Our best view of this innocence contrasts dramatically with the boys' behaviour towards the end of the book. Granted, the boys' behaviour at the outset is different from what we might expect from school children today. However, we must remember that Golding taught (and wrote) in a different era. Back then, students didn't give teachers quite so much guff and if they did, paddling served as a fine deterrent to future incidents.

Two scenes, in particular, serve to underscore the innocence theme. The very first one, when Ralph and Piggy meet, when the boys are dressed like they are in the heart of civilised Britain: ‘The fair boy stopped and jerked his stockings with an automatic gesture that made the jungle seem for a moment like the Home Counties."

And then, we have the climactic scene in Chapter 11, Castle Rock, when Piggy is by the rolling boulder. But it's not until the last chapter that we see Ralph, alone in the jungle, weeping for his lost friends. And for all the lost innocence. Whether only his or all of the boys' is not known.

Ralph, in particular, is described as healthily muscled, but ‘there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil’.  The word ‘devil’ only appears twice in the whole book. It served a light-hearted, complimentary function at the start. But the tale's darkening tone means that, by Chapter 11, when we read of ‘the anonymous devils’ faces’ there is a real threat implied with the word's usage.

In the story's final scene, the naval officer presumes that the mud-plastering and the dressing-up were just ‘fun and games’. However, he is surprised (shocked?) by the response to his question "Nobody killed, I hope?"  Ralph’s tears are both a response to the end of innocence and also as proof that he has lost his own innocence. He now has the ability to recognise that, good things, once gone, will never return.

Civilisation and Savagery

First, Golding describes the boys creating a fair sort of system. We find an agreed-upon leader, a symbol for democratic participation (the conch) and a shared need to draw the society together. The ‘assembly’, is a meeting that can’t survive alongside the desire to hunt, break and kill. In 1954, such assemblies - school gatherings, were common. If you get that impression as you read about the assembly, you've proven Mr Golding's storytelling ability.

Assembling democratically and hunting to kill are antithetical. Contrast the scene in Chapter 5, when the assembly is first suggested, with the scene in Chapter 11, when Jack and his gang decry the rules and ‘law and rescue’.  In assembly, the boys talk one at a time, punctuated by ‘murmurs’.  In the other scene, the boys shout at the same time, interrupted by a ‘clamour’.

Note also that the boys quickly strip off their uniforms. You might say that, symbolically, they are shedding their civilisation. Later, they give up their names. Ralph unwittingly betrays his friend by calling him ‘Piggy’ and encouraging others to see him as a victim, but he is not the only one to be degraded by his name.

When a small boy is asked who he is by the naval officer, Golding writes: "Percival Wemys Madison sought in his head for an incantation that had faded clean away." The long and upper-class name is merely a distant ‘incantation’ – something magical and never understood.

But it is the tragedy of Golding’s story that civilisation is actually ineffective at combating savagery.  Sam and Eric may be his good friends, but his support for Piggy and Ralph is weak. When Jack is confronting them, Golding mocks his character: ‘Sam and Eric protested out of the heart of civilization. “Oh, I say!”’

Closely related to the loss of innocence, the loss of rules is somehow even more awful. Perhaps it's because the boys need them so desperately. And again, their need reflects the needs of greater society. It wouldn't (necessarily) be hyperbole to say our civilisation would collapse if we failed to live by its rules.

Diversity and Conformity

In Lord of the Flies, how society is organised is a major theme, albeit quietly outlined. Indeed, the violence and loss of innocence are this tale's memorable attention-grabbers. But perhaps Golding meant for us to focus on the not-so-obvious takeaways.

Piggy has several traits that mark him as different. He is punished for his natural non-conformity with taunts and bullying throughout the story. Yet when Ralph insists upon the rules in the first assembly, Jack reacts against them because he wants the freedom to live differently.

It appears that Jack's acceptance of diversity must be only for what he favours. He loves the idea that he is free to do as he wishes, to ‘hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat—!”’ But he also needs the ideal of Ralph’s society to react against. So he's a thorough non-conformist and gives only token acceptance to diversity. Said differently: he'll accept everyone conforming to his ideas.

Ironically by the end of the book, the biggest crime that Ralph and his supporters have committed, in Jack’s eyes, is to refuse to join in with the new conformity. “What d’you mean by it, eh?” said the chief fiercely. “What d’you mean by coming with spears? What d’you mean by not joining my tribe?” Golding points out that as the majority shifts, human morality can be entirely redefined.

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The Lord of the Flies: Symbols

Typically, books are not visual media. That's especially true of works published before the rise of the graphic novel. So, rather than expanding the word count to describe all of the ideas a tale such as this involves, the author uses symbols. They are an economic way to tie their narrative to concepts readers are familiar with. William Golding makes particularly judicious use of symbols in this work.

Three conch shells of various sizes resting on a wooden surface against a dark background.
In this book, the conch became the symbol of democracy. Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

The Conch

The conch is mentioned 180 times in the book, first as ‘interesting and pretty and a worthy plaything’. It gets destroyed with the same rock that kills Piggy. Even after that event, the conch is mentioned five times. As Ralph remembers it, now emblematic of everything ‘solemn’ and proper: "There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch."

The phrase associated with the shell is ‘I got the conch’; the simplicity of this is itself a warning. The boys think that authority can be bestowed - or, more to the point, claimed by possession of a special object.  However, the conch is meaningless absent any respect for the idea it represents.  In some ways, the boys did an amazing thing to create this symbol that is heard ‘all across the island’ – and far beyond the book. But it is a fragile thing, easily broken.

Piggy’s Glasses

Piggy’s glasses are also fragile, yet they have the power to make fire. Whoever has possession of them holds that power. The glasses are mentioned 42 times in the book, often described as ‘flashing’ in the steady tropical sunshine.

They are a mark of Piggy’s vulnerability, an artefact of civilisation, a tool and a displacement object (Piggy is forever cleaning them).  Key scenes revolving around the glasses include the second part of Chapter Two, when the fire is first lit. Also, at the end of Chapter Four, one of the glasses' lenses is broken when Jack hits Piggy. Finally, at the end of Chapter Ten, the boys realise why Jack and his hunters made their attack.

The Beast

The beast is only imaginary, yet the word appears 113 times in the book. To begin with, the boys talk of a ‘beastie’ – the diminutive suffix implying a childish, silly bogey – the fear of the ‘littluns’.  The word ‘beastie’ doesn’t appear after Chapter Five. Simon reckons that the ‘beast’ may in fact be real, but only as a part of the ‘darkness of man’s heart’. This thought is too abstract for many of the boys. Jack reclaims their attention with profanity.

Later, Jack kills a sow and makes an offering. Simon looks intently at the head of the pig, speaks to and hears from a voice that Golding identifies as the Lord of the Flies.  And although this voice says that it intends to ‘have fun’, this moment and the seriousness with which a reader chooses to take it really decide your reading of the whole book.

To write an essay response to the story it is essential that you really do hold an opinion and your own reaction.  The simplest way is to consider this scene and to ask yourself, how real is this ‘beast’ within?  Do you believe that Golding’s story is realistic, or pure fantasy? What if you need an extra hand revising English? You can book private GCSE English tuition to boost your learning. You can find the right tutor for you from the Superprof website.

A small red and white fishing boat moored by the beach under an overcast sky
We often dream of lush tropical getaways but what if you were stranded on a deserted island? Photo by Adli Wahid on Unsplash

The Real Lord of the Flies Case

Peter Warner was a defiant young man. The heir to his father's vast fortune which included Electronic Industries, Peter had heard the siren's call from the sea. He had no interest in ledgers or managing any business, let alone one that comprised the lion's share of the country's radio market. At 17 years old, he sailed off and didn't return until several years later.

His father was far from proud of his son's daring spirit. Upon Peter's return, he ordered the boy, now a man, into the business. But the sea still called, and Peter gladly went, every chance he could. It was on one of those illicit voyages that he noticed burnt patches of ground on a supposedly deserted island. 'Ata's population had long been gone, wiped out by the slave trade. And then, he spotted a long-haired creature diving off a cliff.

Astounded, he witnessed more boys, naked, wild and screaming, also taking the plunge. The first boy soon made it to his boat, introducing himself as Stephen. He went on to say he reckons they'd been stranded on that island for about 15 months. They were all Tongan schoolboys and had been quite sick of school, particularly of school meals. One evening, they grabbed a fishing boat, never anticipating the storm headed their way.

They were adrift for eight days before spying land. In short order, they found shelter, set up reservoirs for rainwater, planted a garden. They caught some of the island's wild chickens, built pens and domesticated them. They built a fire and, in shifts of two, ensured it never went out. Their first rule - their guiding principle was: never quarrel.

When we read tales like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, we can readily see the darkest sides of humanity. But the boys from 'Ata and their fantastic tale show us that darkness is not humanity's default setting. Indeed, there's so much more in us that's good and right. We just don't sing those praises enough. Proof of that is Lord of the Flies' enduring popularity. It's been made and remade into films; the book has sold more than 10 million copies.

If Peter Warner hadn't investigated, those six boys likely would have spent far longer than the one year as 'Ata's lone human inhabitants. And we never would have known their story. Indeed, we almost don't know it now, uplifting as it is. It was only an obscure news item in 1966, when it happened. Today, word of their adventure has all but disappeared.

A round blue plaque mounted on a brick wall upon which is written in white letters that William Golding taught at Bishop Wordsworth School.
William Golding taught at this school while writing Lord of the Flies. Source: Wikipedia Credit: Peter Denton

William Golding on Lord of the Flies

Looking over Mr Golding's life and work, he seems a rather pitiless fellow. For most of his life, his views of humanity were harsh. He obviously didn't look favourably on the boys he taught, either. But perhaps he reserved the most biting criticism for himself. He suffered from bouts of depression and battled alcoholism. He once confessed to his own dark impulses by likening himself to a Nazi. "I am of that sort by nature", he said.

Writing from such an unpleasant mindset, is it any wonder that Lord of the Flies takes the frightening turn it does? Let's not rush to judge, though. The book was published in 1954, just nine years after Mr Golding's stint in the Second World War. He had seen plenty of senseless violence and lust for power. It may have been cathartic for him to let go of those experiences by setting up fictional tribes and letting them fight things out. And possibly, the regrets and losses revealed at the end of the book were his own.

But we also have to factor in the editorial process. The first editor he submitted this manuscript to rejected it out of hand, saying it was far too "rubbish and dull". The rejections piled up until Charles Monteith agreed to publish it, provided Golding rewrite several parts of the story. By the end of the edits, Golding stated "I've lost any kind of objectivity I ever had over this novel and can hardly bear to look at it.".

The last 20 or so years of his life seem to have been less tortured. He finally managed to kick alcohol and turned again to writing prolifically. Whether he knew about the Tongan boys stranded on 'Ata for more than a year and how their experiences differed from his first work is not known.

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Emma

I am passionate about traveling and currently live and work in Paris. I like to spend my time reading, gardening, running, learning languages, and exploring new places.