William Golding was a British novelist,
poet, and Nobel Prize laureate. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1983.
With the appearance of Lord
of the Flies (1954), Golding’s first published novel, the author began his
career as both a campus cult favorite and one of the most distinctive and
debated literary talents of his era.
The novel is actually the author’s ‘‘answer’’ to
nineteenth-century writer R. M. Ballantyne’s The
Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean.
These two books share the same basic plot
line and even some of the same character names. Although some similarities
exist, Lord of the Flies totally reverses Ballantyne’s concept of the
purity and innocence of youth and humanity’s ability to remain civilized under
the worst conditions.
In Lord of the Flies, Golding presented
the central theme of his collective works: the conflict between the forces of
light and dark within the human soul. Although the novel did not gain
popularity in the United States until several years after its original
publication, it has now become a modern classic, most often studied in high
schools and colleges.
Lord of the Flies
shows that when people are abandoned in a faraway place, far from traditional
external authorities, their deepest nature is exposed. The novel has been
interpreted by some as being Golding’s response to the popular artistic notion
of the 1950s that youth was a basically innocent collective and that they are
the victims of adult society (as seen in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye). In
1960, C. B. Cox deemed Lord of the Flies as ‘‘probably the
most important novel to be published . . . in the 1950s.’
The story examines a group of schoolboys
abandoned on a desert island during a global war and highlights the conflict
between the forces of light and dark within the human soul.
The book explores the dark side of human
nature and stresses the importance of reason and intelligence as tools for
dealing with the chaos of existence. In the novel, children are evacuated from
Britain because of a nuclear war. One airplane, with adults and prep-school
boys as passengers, crashes on an uninhabited island, and all the adults are
killed. As the boys fashion their own society, their attempts at establishing a
social order gradually devolve into savagery. Finally abandoning all moral
constraints, the boys commit murder before they are rescued and returned to
civilization.
- Gale/Britannica/Routledge
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