Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
Cover of Lord of the Flies, Educational Edition
Maybe there is a beast – maybe it’s only us.
A group of boys, ages 6 to 12, revert to savagery after being stranded on a desert island with no adults to care for them or tell them what to do.
I don’t know why they give Lord of the Flies to kids in grade school to read. I’m sure the reasoning is because the story has kids in it, but it’s about the abrupt loss of innocence, which seems like a hard concept to grasp if you haven’t left childhood behind.
The stranded boys don’t become savages immediately after they shipwrecked on the isalnd. First, they try to govern themselves and organize means for getting food and signaling for help. Fear is what drives them to barbarism: fear of the beast, the other, the darkness that they eventually discover is inside them.
The final scene shows the surviving boys being rescued just before complete chaos — and, quite possibly, total destruction — descends. But who rescues them? Men at war. These men seem civilized with their clean uniforms and their rules, but we know now that the veneer covering savagery is woefully thin. And there is no one to rescue them. So Ralph weeps, not for what has happened to him so much as for knowing what is inside him, what he is destined to become. This is an adult insight, I think best appreciated by adult readers, so if you haven’t read Lord of the Flies in a while, give it a reread. You may be surprised, as I was, at how complex a little book this is.
Fun facts:
- The name “Lord of the Flies” is a reference to the demon Beelzebub; in the novel, it refers to a pig’s head stuck on top of a sharpened stick.
- Stephen King has said that his writing was greatly influenced by Lord of the Flies, and the book appears prominently in his novels Hearts in Atlantis, Misery and Cujo.
- The name of Stephen King’s fictional small town, Castle Rock, came from the fictional fort by the same name in Lord of the Flies.
- Rob Reiner’s production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, which took its name from King’s fictional town (the setting of Stand By Me) produced a film version of Lord of the Flies in 1990.
My son loved this book, but I didn’t give it to him until he was a teenager. Any younger and I don’t think he would have appreciated it as much.
Comment by livingsimplyfree — October 14, 2012 @ 9:43 pm
Did you know that Lord of the Flies is a literary assault on another book, Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne which Golding disagreed with in it’s Utopian views of children, and mankind in general? I tend to consider the work to be a cautionary tale of religion and social hierarchy, and find nothing offensive in it for young people with a taste for horror, which, at it’s core, I feel the book is. I have also gone on the quest of reading the classics, mostly from the various high school reading lists, only to find that many of them were as amazing as I found them to be back then, though a couple were not of much interest to me even now. (I will, for whatever reason, never be enamored of Madame Bovary or Tess of the D’Ubervilles)
Comment by Steven Bentley — October 26, 2012 @ 7:09 am
I did not know that. Thanks for sharing. It’s fun to rediscover the classics outside of the educational context, although like you, I am sure some books will never appeal. I’ve never been a Dickens fan myself.
Comment by Shannon — October 26, 2012 @ 7:37 am
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