Overview
A group of boys stranded on an uninhabited island descend from civilized cooperation into savage violence, revealing the darkness inherent in human nature.
Golding published Lord of the Flies in 1954 after more than twenty rejections. The novel — about a group of British schoolboys stranded on an island who descend into violence — draws on Golding's wartime experience in the Royal Navy and his subsequent years teaching at a boys' school. He later said the book was a response to R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), which had depicted a group of similarly stranded boys maintaining perfect civility.
Key Ideas
Civilization is fragile
Without societal structures, human beings quickly revert to primal instincts.
The beast is within
The real monster is not external but the capacity for evil that exists within every person.
Power and fear
Those who exploit fear gain power over those who try to maintain reason.
Who should read this
Readers willing to look at a dark argument about human nature clearly. Lord of the Flies is widely misread as a book about children specifically; it is a book about what happens to people when the structures of civilisation are removed, and Golding's claim is that civilisation is more fragile than we imagine. The book is a useful provocation to pair with Rousseau.
Who might skip it
Skip if you have a strong prior commitment to an optimistic view of human nature and are not open to having it pressed on. Golding is unsparing, and the novel's violence — particularly toward Piggy — is disturbing. Skip also if you're tired of its school-curriculum reputation; many adult readers return to it and find it better than they remembered.
The verdict
A novel that has held up because its argument has held up — or, more pessimistically, because the last seventy years of history have not refuted it. I reread it recently and was surprised at how tightly constructed it is, and at how beautifully Golding can shift between a boy's-eye view and an adult narrator's comment. Not a pleasant book; an important one.
"Maybe there is a beast... maybe it's only us."
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
If you liked this
Rites of Passage for Golding's most ambitious later novel. The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne for the book Golding was answering.