Lord of the Flies—William Golding

Even little things fall apart

The Lord of the Flies (AI-generated image)

My book club chose Lord of the Flies as part of our decision to focus on banned books. Because of its banned status, I expect everyone in the world has read it, so I won’t worry about spoilers.

A group of boys from an English boarding school survive an airplane crash and find themselves on a deserted island. The older boys recognize that survival will take organization, but with no adults around, they must band together.

They recognize the need for food, shelter, safety, and rescue—rescue most of all. Food does not pose a real problem. Once they discover fruit trees in the nearby jungle, the food issue becomes a matter of variety. Shelter doesn’t worry them either, as the balmy weather makes it more of a luxury than a necessity. They do eventually build some simple huts. Safety also disappears as a concern when some exploration reveals no snakes or predators. Although the island has no real monsters, the children still fear an imagined one, which they call “the Beast.” Aside from that, only one thing really matters: rescue.

The story unfolds through the interaction between Ralph, Jack, and “Piggy,” though an unspecified number of other boys survived. Everyone ridicules Piggy, despite his intelligence, because of his obesity, asthma, and weak eyesight. Jack wants to be the leader, but the group elects Ralph. Jack nurses a resentment throughout, and, in the final part of the novel, leaves the tiny democracy, taking with him those who prefer a tyrant.

The boys lack basic bushcraft skills, and they have no grownups to organize them. So two items come to take on outsized importance: a lens from Piggy’s glasses that can concentrate the sun’s light to start a fire, and a conch shell that allows them to make a loud noise and convene a meeting even when the group has scattered. They also agree that the conch shell will confer the right to speak at meetings. Whoever holds the shell has the floor.

Authority over nature and people? (AI-generated)

As the chosen leader, Ralph takes his responsibility seriously. He knows their only hope for rescue lies in sending up a smoke signal that a passing ship might spot. That means they must start a fire, ensure it produces a lot of smoke, and keep it from going out or getting out of control. The novel thus revolves around the need for fire and the need for a division of labor, since the thrill of watching a fire quickly turns into tedious work.

When Jack and his buddies discover wild pigs on the island, a schism quickly develops between those who prefer to hunt and those content to gather fruit. Jack becomes the leader of the hunters, and their initial revulsion to killing gives way to a thirst for blood. The group gradually sinks into savagery, and the story ends after everyone but Ralph has defected to Jack’s tribe. In the final terrifying scene, the boys, their faces and bodies painted and armed with crude spears, sweep the island in an effort to flush Ralph out of hiding, and kill him.

Golding does several things in this, his first published novel. Probably foremost, he opposes the survival stories that he and countless other schoolchildren grew up with. Robinson Crusoe (1719) reassures its English audience that any enlightened Englishman, by virtue of his Britishness, can and should rule any wilderness and its indigenous people. That book inspired many others that have filled the imaginations of children ever since: Coral Island, Swallows and Amazons, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, and the Tarzan novels to name a few. Golding challenges the imperialistic assumptions he grew up with by telling this anti-Crusoe tale, in which the jungle within overwhelms the veneer of civilization, even in an ideal setting with abundant supplies and no natural adversities. Anyone, Golding seems to say, could “go feral.”

He also may have wanted to say something about human nature, pointing to a chaotic evil in the hearts of everyone. Early on, Jack, the cruelest and most bloodthirsty of the boys, says, “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.” But when the boys try to locate an imagined creature they think must lurk in the jungle, the one named Simon suggests, “Maybe it’s only us.” The others scoff at the idea that they themselves could have an evil side. But later when they kill a boar and mount its head on a stake, Simon hallucinates a conversation with the head—the “Lord of the Flies.” It says to him, “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! … You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!”

Most readers want to look for the “meanings” of stories. This one almost cries out for interpretation. What does the conch shell represent? The pig’s head? The glasses? What does Golding want to teach us about human nature? I reject this approach. I think it diminishes a great work of fiction to not let it function as a work of fiction—to reduce it to a puzzle we must solve. If fiction contains no more than an opinion asserted imaginatively but without data or argumentation, I’d rather spend my time reading op-ed articles. I have an approach I much prefer.

In my recent post about Beloved, I raised the question, “What experience does the author offer the reader?” I want to raise that question again. Golding describes the gradual descent of the other boys into barbarism, but the experience he invites us to imagine comes from Ralph’s mind. While reading this book, we imagine ourselves trying to hold together the center of a decaying society. Jack remains other than us, despite Golding’s revealing his motivations and feelings. In fact, we understand what goes on within most of the other characters, but they still remain outside or other. Anyone who has ever tried to maintain order in a contentious meeting or a discussion can recognize the feeling of losing control or having one’s authority challenged. That feeling—the loss or order, the falling apart, the disintegration—despite its personal character in real-life, has surely shaped human experience for as long as we’ve had social order at all, and this novel puts us into a fictional space closer to the archetype itself. Committee meetings, after all, don’t usually end with everyone chasing after us with spears, even if we feel like they might.

When I first read The Lord of the Flies in 2009, I faulted it for compressing the time involved. It seemed to me that Ralph too quickly lost the ability to recall words or retain a thought long enough to complete a sentence. I felt that such a drastic change would take many years of isolation, not just a few months in a social group. Now, I believe I completely missed the point. Golding guides us through a mental and social collapse—an alchemical calcination within the crucible of a tiny island. Anthropological plausibility means nothing when we undergo the psychic reality of an abaissement du niveau mental.¹

In the final pages, the narration itself crumbles into impressions and abandons the normal rules of grammar, blending third-person and second-person perspectives, indicative and imperative moods, past and present tenses:

The savage peered into the obscurity beneath the thicket. You could tell that he saw light on this side and on that, but not in the middle—there. In the middle was a blob of dark and the savage wrinkled up his face, trying to decipher the darkness.

The seconds lengthened. Ralph was looking straight into the savage’s eyes.

Don’t scream.

You’ll get back.

Now he’s seen you. He’s making sure.

§ § §

Next week, I plan to switch gears dramatically and tackle a work of 17th-century prose, the final chapter of which George Saintsbury called “the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world.” I refer to Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia: Urne-Burial or, a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.

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Works mentioned in this post

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe

The Coral Island, by Robert Michael Ballantyne

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome

Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie

Tarzan of the Apes, by William Rice Burroughs

Hydriotaphia: Urne Burial by Sir Thomas Browne

1. Carl Jung used the phrase to signify the lowering of the mental threshold, where unconscious contents begin to invade consciousness, often leading to an experience of ego dissolution.