Golding: Lord of the Flies

by John S. Whitley

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[Andries Nieuwenhuize · Rating 4 out of 5]

prof. Whitley seems to struggle with LOTF's ending. Imho having the closure so thin and shallow, thin as the clothes of the Naval officer, it's not Ralph looking up, but the reader looking down, observing the decorations first, remembering our ethic standards we were almost forgotten due to the immersive story, and then discovering the savage again. And still, we hear us saying silly things, that civilised boys should have put up a better show than that, immediately realising that there is more to say, cause we bear witness now...

[Wallowing Hippo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting essay about the themes in the novel. Short, so not too exhausting to read.

'Lord of the Flies is governed by the idea that man is a fallen creature.Reacting against the Romantic notion that man is basically noble if freed from the fetters of society, Golding insists that evil is inherent in man.' (p.7)
As a fable it avoids a contemporary social reality and uses an isolated setting. Romantics believed that man is noble and would recreate that nobility in a new unpopulated environment; it is society and its institutions that create man's inhumanity to man not man's heart, which is full of goodness. Golding refutes that: the boys do not recreate nobility.

Interest in children in literature grew in Victorian times when the child represents 'a pre-Industrial innocence' a view brutally overthrown by Freud in 1905.

'The true power of Golding's novel lies in the consistent presentation of boys on the most realistic level allied to a symbolic structure which increasingly invests their actions with larger meanings involving that capacity for evil inherent in every human heart.'(p.24)