“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”
-William Golding
I took a brief hiatus from the blog this past month, but since finals are over and summer has started, the reflections will be up once again.
The Lord of The Flies, by William Golding.
This novel is shocking. It’s a book that follows the improbable survival, heroic rise, and eventual downfall of a group of British schoolboys who become stranded on an island after a plane crash. The prose is filled to the brim with hauntingly beautiful descriptions of the seas, mountains, and forests. I use the word haunting because, throughout Golding’s powerfully visual storytelling of the bright seas and luscious forests, I felt a tense sense of unease. It was the same unease that one gets in films like Get Out, where a happy community is almost too happy, too peaceful, and too perfect. It’s a community that will never last, and throughout the novel, I was hesitantly awaiting the inevitable downfall of this island paradise.
The original leader of these British schoolboys is Ralph, a fair-haired boy, one of the oldest on the island. His purpose for the small tribe is simple: keep a smokey fire going and try to catch the attention of a passing ship. At first, the community listens to him. That fire is more than just a smoky signal; it’s the hope of rescue and hope of civilization. The tribe follows rules of decency, democracy, and leaving no one behind. They are Adam and Eve and their island is Eden, but sadly, we know what happens to Eden. The fire goes out and with it, their hope.
The reason that so many people find this book revolting and offensive is the central claim that it puts forward: the idea of an original sin of man. This idea is quite common in Freudian psychology and in many religious circles, but it is not one that is universally accepted. Golding is writing this in the wake of world war II and the Holocaust and he, among many others, are attempting to explain the downfall of society and what went so wrong. Golding holds that it’s not through any corrupt organization of society that caused our evils but it’s through the inherent evil in every person, no matter how small. His group of British schoolboys is essentially a small society, and throughout Lord of The Flies, we witness that society form its own tribes, customs, and dances. It’s a society that’s free from any outside pressures of a larger civilization and yet, through the evil in the children’s hearts, crumbles from an organized democracy into a vicious totalitarian dictatorship in which they are hunting their own for sport.
Golding overturns the conventional narrative of the innocence of children and holds that children aren’t good because they are pure, but only because they are ignorant.