Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- © 1954; rpt. Penguin Books, 2018
- Kindle ed., 189 pages
- ISBN 978-1-101-15810-4
The basic plot of this novel is memorable, but I reread it to see if there are significant details that I’d forgotten since I read the book way back in high school.
What I didn’t remember is the apocalyptic suggestion: that the boys’ plane crashed at around the time when cold-war tensions were escalating and the possibility of a nuclear war that would wipe out humanity loomed large. The crash of another plane high up the mountain leaves a parachuter dead, hanging in his gear from the trees, swaying back and forth whenever a gust of wind inflated the parachute. It is this dead soldier and his parachute that the boys interpret as the monster that lives on the mountain.
But of course the real monster is the uncivilized portion of human nature lurking inside each boy, and that is the novel’s memorable message.
While I was rereading the novel, my husband found online a newspaper article about a case remarkably similar to what happened to Golding’s British school boys. (See Study Notes, below.) In 1966, an Australian sailor rescued six boys from a remote island south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been marooned on the island for 15 months. Their experience in the wild was markedly different from that of Jack, Piggy, Simon, and the others in Lord of the Flies.
It turns out that William Golding was an alcoholic, prone to depression, with a pronounced pessimistic outlook on life. I was enormously relieved to read the story of how real-life boys had lived the experience of being shipwrecked much differently than Golding had imagined it.
Study Notes
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
Rubbish and dull. Pointless’: How Lord of the Flies was rescued from the reject pile
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
