William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 68 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–1999.
Background
The book indicates that it takes place in the midst of an unspecified nuclear war. Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. Most appear never to have encountered one another before. The book portrays their descent into

savagery; left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.
At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting human impulses toward civilization and social organization—living by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and toward the will to power. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies. The name "Lord of the Flies" is a literal translation of Beelzebub, from .
Plot
In the midst of a wartime evacuation, a British plane crashes on or near an isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood or preadolescence. Two boys—the fair-haired Ralph and an overweight, bespectacled boy nicknamed "Piggy"—find a conch, which Ralph uses as a horn to call all the survivors to one area. Due largely to the fact that Ralph appears responsible for bringing all the survivors together, he is quickly elected their "chief", though he does not receive the votes of the members of a boys' choir, led by the red-headed Jack Merridew. Ralph asserts three primary goals: to have fun, survive, and to maintain a smoke signal that could alert passing ships to their presence on the island. The boys declare that whoever holds the conch shall also be able to speak at their formal gatherings and receive the attentive silence of the larger group.
Jack organises his choir group into a hunting party responsible for discovering a food source. Ralph, Jack, and a quiet, dreamy boy named Simon soon form a loose triumvirate of leaders. Though he is Ralph's only confidant, Piggy is quickly made into an outcast by his fellow "biguns" and becomes an unwilling source of laughs for the other children. Simon, in addition to supervising the project of constructing shelters, feels an instinctive need to protect the "littluns" .
The semblance of order quickly deteriorates as the majority of the boys turn idle, giving little aid in building shelters, and begin to develop paranoias about the island, referring to a supposed monster, the "beast", which they believe to exist on the island. Ralph insists that no such beast exists, but Jack, who has started a power struggle with Ralph, gains control of the discussion by boldly promising to kill the beast. At one point, Jack summons all of his hunters to hunt down a wild pig, drawing away those assigned to maintain the signal fire. A ship travels by the island, but without the boys' smoke signal to alert the ship's crew, the ship continues by without stopping. Angered by the failure of the boys to attract potential rescuers, Ralph considers relinquishing his position, but is convinced not to do so by Piggy.
One night, an aerial battle occurs over the island while the boys sleep, during which a dead fighter pilot is ejected from his plane.

His body drifts down to the island in his parachute; both get tangled in a tree near the top of the mountain. Later on, while Jack schemes against Ralph, twins Sam and Eric, now assigned to the maintenance of the signal fire, see the corpse of the fighter pilot and his parachute in the dark. Mistaking the corpse for the beast, they run to the cluster of shelters that Ralph and Simon have erected and warn the others. This unexpected meeting again raises tensions between Jack and Ralph. Shortly thereafter, Jack decides to lead a party to the other side of the island, where a mountain of stones, later called Castle Rock, forms a place where he claims the beast resides. Only Ralph and Jack's sadistic supporter Roger agree to go; Ralph turns back shortly before the other two boys. When they arrive at the shelters, Jack calls an assembly and tries to turn the others against Ralph, asking for them to remove him from his position. Receiving little support, Jack, Roger, and another boy leave the shelters to form their own tribe. This tribe lures in recruits from the main group by providing a feast of cooked pig and its members begin to paint their faces and enact bizarre rituals including sacrifices to the

beast.
Simon, likely an epileptic, wanders off on his own to think and finds a severed pig head, left by Jack as an offering to the beast. Simon envisions the pig head, now swarming with scavenging flies, as the "Lord of the Flies" and believes that it is talking to him. The pig's head tells Simon that the boys themselves "created" the beast and claims that the real beast is inside them all. Simon also locates the dead parachutist who had been mistaken for the beast, and is the sole member of the group to recognize that the "monster" is merely a human corpse, before it soon after falls off the island into the sea. Simon, hoping to tell others of the discovery, finds Jack's tribe in the island's interior during a ritual dance and, mistaken for the beast, is killed by the frenzied boys. Ralph, Piggy, Sam, and Eric feel guilty that they, too, participated in this murderous "dance".
Jack and his band of "savages" decide that they should possess Piggy's glasses, the only means of starting a fire on the island, so they raid Ralph's camp, confiscate the glasses, and return to their abode on Castle Rock. Ralph, now deserted by most of his supporters, journeys to Castle Rock to confront Jack and secure the glasses. Taking the conch and accompanied only by Piggy, Sam, and Eric, Ralph finds the tribe and demands that they return the valuable object. Turning against Ralph, the tribe takes Sam and Eric captive while Roger drops a boulder from his vantage point above, killing Piggy and shattering the conch. Ralph manages to escape, but Sam and Eric are tortured until they agree to join Jack's tribe.
The following morning, Jack orders his tribe to begin a manhunt for Ralph. Jack's savages set fire to the forest while Ralph desperately weighs his options for survival. Following a long chase, most of the island is consumed in flames. With the hunters closely behind him Ralph trips and falls. He looks up at a uniformed adult - a naval officer whose party has landed from a passing warship to investigate the fire. Ralph bursts into tears over the death of Piggy and the "end of innocence". Infected by his emotion, Jack and the other children, filthy and unkempt but suddenly reverting to their true ages, also spontaneously erupt into sobs. After expressing disappointment that "British boys" had fallen into such feral behaviour, the officer awkwardly turns away to give them a moment to pull themselves together.
Allegorical relationships
Ralph
When he and the others arrive on the island, Ralph quickly becomes the chief of the group, not by any harsh, overt, or physical action, but by being elected. Ralph is described as having "the directness of genuine leadership". Ralph's first big decision is that they have "got to decide if this is an island". After Ralph, Jack, and Simon discover that they are truly "on an uninhabited island", Ralph suggests that a fire be lit because "if a ship comes near the island they may not notice us". However, towards the end of the book he forgets the initial reason for maintaining the fire. This is representative of the debilitating effects corruption has on even the most benevolent of men. Ralph may seem to mean well, but often his obsession with being popular overcomes him and he resorts to bullying Piggy to regain his power. Therefore, Ralph can be understood to symbolize mankind's optimistic ambition to self-govern despite its historical record of failure and abuse of power. Still, in the midst of all the island's chaos, Ralph has a tendency to be polite, selfless and logical in the tensest of moments; for example, when the children are obliged to investigate Castle Rock, Ralph takes the lead despite being afraid of "the beast". Ralph is sometimes perceived as partially being a literary tool to aid the audience's realisation of inner evil throughout the duration of the novel; "Ralph wept for the end of innocence".
Just as mankind has demonstrated its limitations in effective self-governing, Ralph embodies good intentions in the implementation of reason, but ultimately fails to execute these plans soundly. Ralph's refusal to resort to violence throughout the novel is counterpoised by Jack's inherent love of violence.
Piggy
Piggy has poor eyesight and asthma and is overweight. He is the most physically vulnerable of all the boys. He appears to be of working-class background, as evidenced by his non-standard Cockney speech, but he is the most intellectual of the boys, frequently appealing to reason. By frequently quoting his aunt, he provides the only female voice.
Piggy has been described as "the only adult-type figure on the island".
Simon
Simon is a character who represents peace and tranquillity and positivity, and perhaps mystic or religious impulses.

He is often seen wandering off by himself in a dreamy state and is prone to fits of fainting and hallucination, likely epileptic in nature. He is in tune with the island and often experiences extraordinary sensations when listening to its sounds. He loves the nature of the island. He is positive about the future. He has an extreme aversion to the pig's head, the "Lord of the Flies", which derides and taunts Simon in a hallucination. After this experience, Simon emerges from the forest to tell the others that the "beast" that fell from the sky is actually a deceased parachutist caught on the mountain. He is brutally killed by the boys, who ironically mistake him for the beast and kill him in their "dance" in which they "ripped and tore at the beast". It is implied that Ralph, Piggy, Sam, and Eric partake in the killing. The final words that the "Lord of the Flies" had said to Simon vaguely predicted that his death was about to occur in this manner. Earlier in the novel Simon himself also predicts his own death when he tells Ralph that Ralph will "get back all right", implying that, of the two of them, only Ralph will be saved. Simon's death represents the loss of truth, innocence, and common sense, and along with Piggy's death represents the abandonment of civilization on the island. Simon has also been interpreted as a Christ figure because of his ability to

see through misconception, unlike the rest of the boys, and the events he experiences in the book that parallel those of Jesus' life.
Naval officer
Arriving moments before Ralph's seemingly impending death, the Royal Navy officer is surprised and disappointed to learn that the boys' society has collapsed into chaos. He states that he would have expected "a better show" from British children. The sudden looming appearance of an adult authority figure instantly reduces the savagery of the hunt to a children's game. Upon the officer asking who is in charge, Ralph answers loudly, "I am".