Lord of the Flies William Golding

About the author Born 1911 and worked for many years as a school teacher Awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1983 and knighted in 1988 Died in 1993

Writing ‘Lord of the Flies’ Golding’s first published novel in 1954. Written at a time when the world had seen the systematic destruction of the Jewish race by Hitler’s fascists and the Second World War, which revealed more atrocities committed by man, and in 1945, the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb.

Golding recalled that during the war, he saw ‘humanity fighting itself’. He said, ‘In the war, we became morally and inevitably coarsened. After it we saw, little by little, what man could do to man.’

‘I had vividly in my mind two pictures ‘I had vividly in my mind two pictures. One is the picture of the little boy who discovers that he is actually on a coral island and he was so delighted he stood on his head! The other picture was of this same little boy crying, crying his heart out, because he discovered what actually went on, what people are like in a society when you don’t have law...Because the little boy knew what was inside people and what would come out of them...’ (William Golding)

Golding on Golding... ‘I decided to take the literary convention of boys on an island... And try to show how the shape of the society they evolved would be conditioned by their disease, their fallen natures.’ ‘That really is what the book is about: if you don’t have rules, that is to say, if you don’t have laws, then you’re lost, you’re finished, you’re gone.’ ‘The very confusion of the island, the, as it were, growing confusion of the island, is a sort of image of the growing confusion in the boys’ minds. They are lost in more ways than one.’

Contemporary relevance In 1993, three year old Jamie Bulger was lured away from his mother by Jon Venable and Robert Thompson, both aged ten. They battered him to death on a railway track. In October 1997, Luke Woodham, aged 16, stabbed his mother, drove to school in her car and shot the girl he liked, who had rejected him, along with another girl. He left this manifesto: ‘I am not insane...for murder is not weak or slow witted. Murder is gutsy and daring. I do this to show society: push us and we will push back’. On 24 March, 1998, two young males aged 11 and 13, shot dead four children and one adult. The recent American schoolyard killers are not, in the main, from poor families. In all cases, the schools and communities they come from are hallmarked by devout Christianity.

What’s it all about? A fable or an allegory, attempting to understand how humans can be capable of such cruelty? Religious allegory of the fall/ original sin (Lord of the Flies, literally translated into Hebrew means Beezlebub)? Exploration of leadership; democracy v totalitarianism? Psychological exploration of human nature’s potential for evil?