William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in Historical Context
Brian Ireland

Many critics have explored the theme in Lord of the Flies (1954) of a group of children’s descent from civilization to savagery; of a loss of innocence on an Edenic island, where a mysterious and fearful “beast” causes the children to divide into factions, with murderous outcomes. The novel is, though, multilayered and complex: its plot, characterization, symbolism, and themes invite analysis of opposing dualities such as Christianity and paganism, innocence and guilt, childhood and adulthood, civilization and anarchy, collectivism and individuality, and democratic values as opposed to tyranny. The context of the novel’s production, release, and reception was the immediate post-World War II era and the Cold War clash of ideologies between East and West. Author William Golding had been a junior officer in the Royal Navy during the war and witnessed firsthand its violence and cruelty. These experiences caused him to ponder the origins of violence and humanity’s capacity for good and evil.

To read the full journal article, click HERE.

https://www.salempress.com/Media/SalemPress/samples/ci_lord_of_the_flies_pgs.pdf

Golding’s experience in World War II had a profound effect on his view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable. After the war, Golding resumed teaching and started to write novels.

Readers and critics have interpreted Lord of the Flies in widely varying ways over the years since its publication. During the 1950s and 1960s, many readings of the novel claimed that Lord of the Flies dramatizes the history of civilization. Some believed that the novel explores fundamental religious issues, such as original sin and the nature of good and evil. Others approached Lord of the Flies through the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who taught that the human mind was the site of a constant battle among different impulses—the id (instinctual needs and desires), the ego (the conscious, rational mind), and the superego (the sense of conscience and morality). Still others maintained that Golding wrote the novel as a criticism of the political and social institutions of the West. Ultimately, there is some validity to each of these different readings and interpretations of Lord of the Flies. Although Golding’s story is confined to the microcosm of a group of boys, it resounds with implications far beyond the bounds of the small island and explores problems and questions universal to the human experience.

SparkNotes.com, 2016

During the Second World War, Golding served in the British Navy, on several different ships, and was in charge of specially adapted landing craft for the D-day landings in Normandy, so he witnessed at first hand the horrors of war. He came to the conclusion that human beings are not naturally kind and that even children are capable of incredible cruelty if the circumstances demand or even simply allow it.

Golding was interested in the way that violence can develop from innocent beginnings. Here is an extract from one of his autobiographical works, Scenes from a Life, in which he discusses such a childhood accident:

I swung the bat in a semicircle, missed the ball but hit José with the wooden bat across the side of the head. Instantly he turned and ran for home, one hand holding the side of his head. I was the one who made a noise, anguished to think of the awful thing I had done. But he made not a sound. He always was the silent one. I trundled after him, whimpering and wondering what I should tell mam and dad, or what he would. I trundled back across the Common and down the road to the Green, my fears growing deeper. I can just remember them. I ended at the house, terrified and now as silent as my brother. I remember no more. But years later my parents told me that José had described the whole scene to them. He wasn’t really hurt they said. But I crept in to the house with my terror and hid from everyone else under the dining room table.

The violence in Lord of the Flies starts as a game. The game goes too far and the potential for the extreme savagery that follows can be seen in all the boys except Piggy and perhaps Simon.

You can probably think of examples from your own childhood of situations that got out of hand. A typical ‘play fight’ can easily end up becoming more serious, and young children don’t always see the boundaries between play and reality. For many of the younger boys in the novel, this is exactly what happens: children’s games get out of hand.

To read the full article, click HERE.

https://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/getattachment/Philip-Allan-Pages/Series-Pages/Literature-Guides/Series-Boxes/Sample-Pages/Lord-of-the-Flies.pdf.aspx

***UPDATE***
The campaigning is now complete, and America has its new President-Elect, Donald Trump. Trump’s shock win has unsurprisingly caused a rush of opinion pieces, with Lord of the Flies once again being used as an allegory.
John Doyle, writing in The Globe and Mail, traces Trump’s win to his appearances on reality TV show The Apprentice, arguing that Trump’s appeal lies in the ‘method [he] refined on The Apprentice. The boasting and blustering, the revulsion at any sign of weakness in others, the crudeness and male aggression displayed as honesty and perpetuated as a leadership quality.’ Doyle goes on to write that reality TV has its roots in a novel like Lord of the Flies, and ‘is anchored in age-old or primordial impulses and parables about that.’ In the Huffington Post, Oren Frank calls Trump  ‘a perfect cast for the grown-up version of Lord of the Flies‘. Finally, Lee Drutman, in Vox, claims in the President-Elect’s ‘mind, he is a transformative figure who triumphs in Lord of the Flies Washington, DC.’

So, is this the end of Lord of the Flies being used as a point of comparison for this election? Given Jill Stein’s recent fundraising campaign to challenge the results in a number of key states, I suspect not…

Original Post (12 Sept 2016)

Lord of the Flies was written over 60 years ago, published in 1954, long before the advent of 24-hour news, social media commentary, and readers as news-producers. But the enduring messages of Golding’s seminal novel have made it a touchstone of the complexities of the human condition, and in political news reporting it remains as relevant as it was in the period in which it was first conceived and circulated.

I have written elsewhere about how the novel was used as a symbol of the actions of those involved in the UK riots in 2011, with particular regard to young people, but this year 2016 we have seen an increase in mentions of Lord of the Flies as an analogy for some events in the US election campaigns, especially those involving Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for President. Commentators across a range of media, with a variety of political leanings, have compared aspects and ideas from Lord of the Flies to the impact of Trump’s candidacy. I explore a selection of these here.

To read the full article, click HERE.

https://www.william-golding.co.uk/lord-flies-us-election-updated