Religious Allegory In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

The present work focuses on the idiosyncratic religious nature of the novel. Employing scriptural parallels, William Golding manages to touch the adult readership, providing a religious allegory adapted to nowadays. The author brings to the reader and old but gold novel topic, using the rethorical device of defamiliarization. The topic of a group of schoolboys shipwrecked on a desert island, minds to make the reader become aware of the atrocity and the inhumanity that the totaliarian ideology has brought in the 20th century’s first half and that the Big Brother, the wars, the politics and to say it bluntly, the civilization have introduced in the English society.

The dystopian novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a piece of work,

As the official web site of the Nobel Prize in Literature attests: “Golding inveighs against those who think that it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depths of man himself – it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive.”. William Golding affirms on several occasions, not only in his novels, his opinion “Before the second world war I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of society” and the theory of the inward evil he generates in his novels: “The only enemy of man is inside himself.”. The primary symbol of the evil in the novel is the pig’s head, the true beast living inside each of the schoolboys. To give it a religious connotation too, one can believe that the author chose the pig as a symbol of the evilness, making allusion to the scriptural episode when Jesus Christ restores a demon-possessed man, by letting the demons walk in the herd of pigs: “A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. (Luke