LORD OF THE FLIES, WILLIAM GOLDING

William Golding composed lord of the flies shortly after the end of WWII. At the time of the Novel’s plot, in which a group of English boys stranded on a deserted island struggle to develop their own society, is a social and political thought-experiment using fiction. The story of their attempts at civilization and devolution into savagery and violence brings home the relationship between human nature and society.

In the bide to survive, the characters discover a lot of things which are symbolic.

1.    Fine, craft tools and form political and social systems in a process that represent the development of early man. The culmination of the plot in war and murder shows there are anarchy and brutality instinct in human nature.

As an allegory about human nature and society, lord of the flies draws upon Judeo-Christian mythology to elaborate on the novel’s sociological and political hypothesis. The title has two meanings, both charged with religious significance.

The first is a reference to a line from King Lear, “as flies to wanton boys, are we to gods”.

The second is a reference to Hebrew name Baalzevur or great from Beelzebub meaning: God of the flies is synonymous to Satan.

Golding explains that the moral instinct that governs the individual’s sense of sheer survival is by nature evil in its amoral pursuit of its own goals.

SIMON: represents or functions as a prophetic martyr for the other boys

THE WAR: alludes or represents war conflict between liberal democracy and totalitarian communion.

RALPH: represent the liberal tradition

JACK, before he succumbs to total anarchy, represents the kind of military dictatorship. He also represents an anti-democratic political system. Again, he represents the worst aspects of human nature when unexpressed or un-tempered by society, he also represent irrationality.

THE HUNGER, loneliness and the deadly consequences the children suffered represents political conflicts and the necessity of democratic civilization.

THE CONCH represents or symbolizes democracy and like Ralph, civility and order within the group

SMACHING OF THE CONCH represents of signal the end of order and onset of chaos.

The conch is portrayed as being very vibrant and colourful, but as the novel progresses, its colour begin to fade, the same way society begins to fade on the island.

 ALLEGORY

An allegory is a story with a symbolic level of meaning, where the characters and setting represents, well, other things, like political system, religious figure or philosophical view points.

·        The island represents the whole world

·        Ralph’s conch – led parliament represents democratic government

·        Jack’s tribalism represents autocratic government

·        Piggy represents the forces of rationalism, science and intellect which get ignored at society’s peril.

·        Simon represents a kind of natural morality.

The island itself is an allegory for society. The author shows that, like children stranded or a deserted island, society can breakdown due to bad leadership, mob mentality and lack of true civilization.

An allegory on human society today, the novel’s primary implication being that what we have come to call civilization is , at best not more than skin-deep. The main allegory for lord of the flies is that without civilization, savagery takes over. The lord of the flies and the beast are nor really physical character. It’s the evil that is in every human being without civilization, the boys unleashed this evil, piggy stand for intellect which every civilization needs, when he died, it showed that savagery had completely taken over. Also over Simon stood for morality, but not because he knew that morality was natural. But this book shows the allegory that savagery is strongly and more natural than civilization, this it look over.

The death Simon indicates how morality and goodness cannot survive with savagery. This savagery stops when the naval man appears. He also stands for civilization and has come back, so savagery is put away.

Allegorically, the island and its inhabitants stand for lack of civilization. The book is an account of what would/could happen if people had no rules to follow and had to make their own type of society. Of course, the boys on the island make a mess of things, but never realized it until someone dies. Each of the character have and allegorical representation also. Piggy is the voice of reason, Ralph the leader: the beastie? Maybe society lurking with read. Notice! There are no girls on the island. The lack of girls on the island allows the focus to remain on the males jockeying for leadership roles and other running about the island with total abandon.

The allegory of the book rests in the common nature of man, if you think about the one element that is missing, it is organized religion, and one of the fundamental jobs of religions is to remind us of the better ways to behave as a member of a (world). Community of people without religion, we revert to the natural nature of man as savage to untamed, uncivilized, uncultured, survival based thing without regard for tomorrow.

The lord of the flies is also a biblical allegory, the boys are literally handed a paradise-warm weather, a beautiful lagoon, no nagging adults, plenty of fruits and berries, and wild games for hunting-a Garden of Eden, if you will. But because of their own imperfections and inability to control their savagery, they lose their paradise. They do not listen to Christ-figure Simon, who tries to warn them about their destructiveness. Instead, they murder Simon and later see fire to their paradise and come very close to destroying not only the island but themselves as well.

The novel says the evil is an internal ingredient of human nature and comes under conducive environment.

Golding thus makes the point that as much as the island is a microcosmic example of hoe violence and savagery take over in the absence of “civilization” even in the existence of civilization, there is violence. We do not all it barbaric, hereby because it is dressed in the trappings of deconcern, uniform and order.

Taking “allegory” in the sense of “an act of interpretation”, herewith a few possible reading.

Ralph: the individual in society. This is suggested by the point of view which tends towards limited omniscient through Ralph’s perspective. In this reading, Ralph represents each one of us attempting to lead out lives as each of the forces described below exert its influence.

Jack: the animalistic, or (if you are an animal lover), the pre-rational (for our purposes the non-rational) impulse in human beings to satisfy our physical material desires without regard to the consequences; unchecked, this inevitably leads to violence and cruelty.

Piggy: the intellectual or rational faculty in human beings, which, if not tempered by the other forces within us, becomes selfish and vulnerable to the non-rational force.

Simon: the emotional capacity in human beings which is moved to serve others, while extremely potent, when it comes into conflict with the physical or non-rational it succumbs, at least on the physical level; whether its power is over really extinguished (and the here the parallel between Simon and Christ pertain) might provoke some interesting debate.

Finally, the allegory in the lord of the flies appeals to every group in the society e.g religion, political, morality etc.