William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

The theme in Lord of the Flies by William Golding is the main focus of the novel and is essential to understand it. The theme is revealed by portraying the struggle between the human impulse of savagery and the rules of civilization as the characters in the book. Lord of the Flies can be seen as an allegory which explicates a philosophical meaning by the use of concrete representations.
Throughout the novel, the degradation of the boys’ civilization proves that “societal defects reflect the flaws of human nature” (Gussin 4). This means that in a developing, fragile society, the personal code of ethics cannot be replaced by a political government. Golding doesn’t go into depth of the characters’ descriptions in order to allow the reader to

Lord of the Flies was reviewed by James Stern for the New York Times Book Review, in which he labeled the work as “an allegory on human society today, the novel's primary implication being that what we have come to call civilization is at best no more than skin deep.” Golding exposes this by writing a story where a group of boys go from following their own rules they created to serve in their best interest, to complete man-hunting savages. This surprising transformation can be interpreted as giving humans a real look on how fragile our civilizations that we created are and that the only reason they work is because the majority believe in it. However, as shown in the novel, when people start to stray from these rules, it can cause a chain reaction of dismay. Throughout history, civilizations have been guided by the populus and shaped by the movements/revolutions of the populus to bring about change. By factoring in the time period in which Lord of the Flies was written, it could be construed as “political and historical allegory, even as a cautionary tale for the leaders of the world” (Henningfeld