Kill the beast. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.
(Golding, 75)
Sir William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Highlighted Aspects:
Context and plot overview;
Intertextuality and Evil: Lord of the Files as a parody of R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island;
Analysis of the inner evil existing within humanity;
Civilisation versus Savagery;
Context:
- Lord of the Flies addresses issues such as rationalism, evil, evolution, and religion;
- preoccupation with human tragedy;
- a way of writing existing at the edge between an acutely sceptical and organizing
consciousness and a powerful awareness of the dark beneath consciousness;
- It can be seen as a dystopian novel;
- an adumbration of the disturbing connection between religion, violence, and blood sacrifice;
- it is economical, a fabulation, as it is called;
Plot Overview
A group of young people, the oldest of whom is only 12 and the youngest 6, are left on a
desert island and almost immediately a battle for supremacy commences among the principal
characters.Violence and death follow. Golding’s school boys are in a plane which has been
shot down during what the reader assumes is a war set in the near future. Although the boys
elect a leader, Ralph, and call frequent meetings using a conch shell as a symbol of
authority their attempts at re-creating civilisation quickly founder. Jack Merridew, who is in
charge of hunting, rapidly assumes dominance over the boys, exploiting their superstitious
fears of the beast and he eventually leaves Ralph’s group taking most of the other boys with
him. When Simon, a visionary youth, realises that the beast is in fact a dead parachutist and
attempts to communicate this knowledge to the other boys, Jack’s tribe ritualistically murder
him. Piggy, the first of Golding’s numerous Rationalist figures, is murdered by Jack’s
lieutenant, Roger, while he pathetically holds on to the conch, still believing in civilisation.
Ralph, now completely alone, is hunted like an animal by the others who clearly intend to
sacrifice him when they catch him. The forest is set on fire in order to smoke Ralph out and
just as he is about to be killed, an English sheep sees the smoke and sends a rescue party.
Intertextuality and Evil: Parody of The Coral Island
- The novel is intertextual as it is a re-writing of R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island
(contemporary critics use the term intertextuality to designate the various relationships that a
given text may have with another text);
- Golding overturns Ballantyine’s optimistic portrait which equates English with good and
foreign with evil and suggest that evil is more likely to reside within humanity, including the
English;
- the characters portray sharply differing points of view on the nature of evil and the means of
placating this powerful force;
- The depiction of evil in The Coral Island is stikingly simplistic, revolving about a Christian/
pagan dichotomy;
Examination of Inner Evil Within Humanity:
- the novel is an examination not of the idiosyncratic nature of small boys, but of the essential
nature of humanity itself, the heart of darkness;
- the grim account of propitiation and murder on the island is re-enacted in the greater world
continuously through the unleashing forces of the war;
- Ralph’s bitter understanding of the evil that resides within humanity;
- fear denied, blood lust let loose, and projection of both these among nearly all the boys;
- Lord of the Flies provides a haunting, an unease which comes to light when the head of the
first pig killed, spiked on a stick and offered to the Beast, speaks to the visionary boy Simon.
Civilisation versus Savagery:
- the instinct of savagery is far more primal and fundamental to the human psyche than the
instinct of civilization.
- Golding implies that civilization can mitigate but never wipe out the innate evil that exists
within all human beings.
