William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: A Laboratory Demonstration of Human Behaviour Sans the Restraints of Civilization”

Nobel Laureate Sir William Golding’s Lord of the Flies(1953) has become a compulsory stop on the route of any surveyor of the English novel published in the second half of the twentieth century. During an atomic war, an aeroplane carrying a group of young English school boys is shot down and the party is marooned on an island in the Pacific. The boys, with no elders around, initially try to organize themselves by laying down rules and calling assemblies by means of a conch. Their leader at this stage is Ralph, symbolizing the good, helped by an obese, asthmatic Piggy, symbolizing practical commonsense. But the group slowly regresses to savagery led by the hot-blooded choir leader Jack Merridew, symbolizing evil. There ensues a spate of killings by Jack and his hunters who have let loose a reign of terror and work on fear psychosis. Just at the moment when Ralph is about to be killed by Jack, a naval officer arrives on a rescue ship and escorts the boys back to civilization. However, the Edenic island is on fire and in this realistic novel, Golding shows symbolically the fall of man; democracy is made to bow down before dictatorship; evil wins at the expense of good; and civilization loses at the hands of barbarism.

Lord of the Flies is indeed a demonstration under laboratory conditions of the forms assumed by human behaviour once the restraints of civilization have removed. It is with a definite purpose in mind that Golding lands his characters on an uninhabited island and not on an inhabited one. This island is at a distance from civilization which restraints humans from doing what they would naturally enjoy doing. “Man”, as Rousseau said, “is born free but is everywhere in chains” (The Social Contract, 1762. Web. N.pag.).These ...

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...attack upon the central problem of modern thought: the nature of the human personality upon society” (250).

References

Primary:

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Chennai: Oxford University Press. 1999. Print.

Secondary:

Epstein, E. L. “Notes on Lord of the Flies”. New York: Capricorn Books, 1959. 249-55. Print.

Cox, C. B.“Lord of the Flies.”Critical Quarterly.Summer, 1960.112-17. Print.

Nelson, William.William Golding's Lord of the Flies: A Source Book. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. Print.

Rosenfield, Claire. “Men of a Smaller Growth: A Psychological Analysis of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.”Literature and Psychology. 11 (Autumn, 1961). 93-101. Print.

Stem, James.“English Schoolboys in the Jungle.”New York Times Book Review. October 23, 1955. 38. Print.

Web:

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.The Social Contract. 1762. Web. N.pag. 4 Feb 2014.