Lord of the Flies

n  n
How are dictators being made? Mein Kampf, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, The Last King of Scotland and Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution, won't answer this question perfectly. William Golding has the perfect answer to it through this allegory.

How can a novel about a bunch of stranded school kids teach us about dictators?

This is not just a novel about school boys. This is a novel about the intricate ways the human psyche performs when it is stretched to the paramount in abominable circumstances when liberty is abundant, and everyone is equal, without any prerogatives.

This parable hits the right chord to enlighten us regarding our leniency to entropy. This is exactly how dictators are made. The boys teach us a lot of lessons through the way they behave and the areas they remain silent.

n  n

n  What I learned from this book n
n  1) Who is the beast in the Lord of the flies? n
There is a chance that some people will try to read this novel superficially without thinking about its deeper meaning. It is the concept of the beast discussed by the author that they will ultimately get stuck after being confused. We can interpret the beast in many ways depending on our conscience.

The simplest explanation of the beast is that it is the basic instinct of savagery existing in the minds of human beings. You can interpret it in many complicated ways based on your thinking level.

“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.” n

n  2) Are human beings behaving in a civilized manner just because of the laws that he has to follow? n
This is a tricky question to answer. But it becomes an easy question if you have read this book and contemplated it for some time.

“Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?”

"The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!"
"Who cares?"

n  3) What is the easiest way to know about the personality of a person? n
Golding metaphorically tells us the easiest way to understand the personality of a person.

It is said that personality is who we are and what we do when everybody is watching and character is what we are and what we do when nobody is watching.

The way a person talks to older people, his subordinates, and disabled people tells us a lot about their character. These are the groups of people who cannot stand up as equals for their rights.

We know that adversity builds and reveals character. We can see the author's brilliance by the way how he culminated all the above-mentioned ideas and brilliantly revealed them to us through the behavior of a few stranded children.

"He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were."

n  My favourite three lines from this book n

“The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?"

"I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth."

n  What could have been better?n
Some people may say this novel has extreme racist remarks and body shaming. There is also some content that some readers might find explicit.

This novel was published on 17 September 1954. It would be best if you kept this in the back of your mind while reading it. It is because some people are viewing this book through the current lens of political correctness they find it disturbing. That is one of the greatest injustices we can do to any literary creation.

n  Rating n
5/5 This novel is one among those few masterpieces that can be read in many ways depending on the reader's proclivity.

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أول رواية للكاتب البريطاني ويليام جولدنج نُشرت عام 1954
يكتب جولدنج عن الطبيعة الانسانية بين الخير والشر
كيف يتحول البشر إلى العنف والهمجية والفوضى
وخاصة إذا توفرت الظروف والبيئة المناسبة
فكرة الرواية مزعجة لكنها ترمز إلى الواقع

every time i think about this book, i think about that story of the group of boys who shipwrecked on an island and lived in full-on peace and harmony until their eventual rescue.

seems like you're kind of outing yourself on this one, william golding.

also every time i think about piggy to this day it makes me want to cry.

that's all i got.

this is part of a project i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago. this one is particularly enlightening, wouldn't you say?

Mix a desert island and a bunch of young kids/teens, add a dash of fear and a twist of rebellion, and you have His Majesty of the Flies.
It's a dark book that sometimes shocked me but brilliantly reflected adults and society's world.
Two camps formed between efficiency and reasoning, wanting everything immediately, and hindsight, madness, and survival; only the strongest will survive.

I had never read this classic before now. It was one of the options in Advanced Literature, my freshman year of high school, along with Wuthering Heights and Dune. I ended up choosing Wuthering Heights, which, is an excellent read if you're into the gothic romance stuff. So, I was bringing adult eyes to a book that most people seem to have read as a young adult. And, I have to say, I was enthralled.

As I mentioned in previous reviews, my undergraduate degree is in political science. For whatever reason, I love studying the building blocks of society, the structures of power, and the shifting sands of public opinion and group think. Lord of the Flies is a powerhouse of a book for all of those things.

For those like me who haven't read this (I imagine there must be somebody out there), we start out on an island. There has been a plane crash and only children have survived. We're on an island full of boys- no girls, interestingly enough. I guess Golding didn't want to muddy the waters with gender issues in addition to the social hierarchy stuff. So, there's a charismatic boy named Ralph who meets an overweight kid. Overweight kid shares with Ralph in confidence that the boys back at school used to call him, 'Piggy', but he'd rather be called anything but that. They find a huge conch shell on the beach and use it to call the other survivors to the shoreline. They're sharing names and Ralph tells the group to call the fat kid, Piggy. Now, that was a huge red flag to me. When you tell somebody a secret and, not ten minutes later, they turn around and use that secret against you, you've got to know that you've got problems heading your way.

Well, the newly christened Piggy doesn't have a lot of choice in the matter, because there's an older group of choir boys on the island and the head of that group doesn't like Piggy. So, to protect himself from the provocations of the bigger and stronger boy, Piggy allies himself with Ralph. The entire group takes a vote and decides that Ralph is going to lead this rag-tag bunch. Ralph wants to keep a smokey fire burning at all times, in order to attract the attention of any passing ships, and get the heck off of the island. Choir boy leader, Jack, wants to hunt the wild pigs on the island for meat. He becomes strangely obsessed with this chore and begins to go a bit bonkers- sort like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Remember, there are no adults around to keep the peace. And then things start to fall completely apart...

That's the basic plot. Now, for those people who studied this in school:  What was with the pig head and flies? I was clued in that this was an important part of the story because of the title... but I just couldn't figure it out. Simon, the sensitive and perceptive boy, has prophetic visions about it but then, before he can share the secret of the soldier stuck in the trees, he's killed by the mob. So... what does it all mean? Is it because, underneath, we are all thinly disguised beasts? If there wasn't the rule of law, would we all be running about, sacrificing pig heads to the monsters under the trees? Or, are we the monsters and that is why the pig head was speaking to Simon? Anyway, I'd appreciate clarifying thoughts on it. I asked my husband, who read this in both grade school and high school, what it meant and he couldn't remember. I suppose I could just Google it, but I'd much rather talk about it with other bookworms.

Now for some quotes: "This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun. pg 54 ebook. Famous last words, right?

Superstition and fear enter the picture in some of the first moments on the beach: "He wants to know what you're going to do about the snake-thing."... Either the wandering breezes or perhaps the decline of the sun allowed a little coolness to lie under the trees. The boys felt it and stirred restlessly. pg 55 ebook. Golding could have taken this story a completely different direction and made the beast real. It would have been so cool in a science fiction type of way. Oh well.

My favorite character was, of course, Piggy: "Ralph moved impatiently. The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise. And then the occasion slipped by so that you had to grab at a decision... Only, decided Ralph as he faced the chief's seat, I can't think. Not like Piggy. ... Piggy could think. He could go step by step inside that fat head of his, only Piggy was no chief. But Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains. Ralph was a specialist in thought now, and could recognize thought in another." pg 125, ebook. You think Roger ever got any psychological treatment for being such a psycho and killing people? One can only hope.

One of the original young adult dystopian reads, Lord of the Flies is an excellent pick for reluctant readers. Don't let the label of "classic" fool you. It has a very fast pace and I'm still picking apart the details in my head even though I finished it a couple days ago. Some read alikes: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (of course) and The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey (fresh take on a dystopian world, accepted social order, and power struggles between characters).

Perhaps one of the only people in the world who never read this book in high school, I thought that it was high time that I tested the waters. William Golding has created quite the novel, using young adolescents to develop key societal themes while being isolated from the world. After their plane crashes on a deserted island, the surviving young boys gather to determine how they will survive. Using a conch shell as both a gathering tool and one that denotes speaking power, the boys elect Ralph as their leader. From there, it is a delegation of duties to ensure everything is done, something Ralph discovers is not as easy as he would like. His greatest rival for leadership, Jack, begins to instil distrust and rallies those around him not to fall into line with Ralph. As time progresses, cracks occur in the unified group and they splinter off, with Jack taking some of the older boys into his own ‘savage’ camp. The two groups are forced to devise new ways to procure the needed skills for survival. Ralph agrees to attend a feast held by the saved group, only to discover that they are ruthless and end up killing one of the boys. As outside assistance remains bleak, tough choices will have to be made and the lives of all the boys lay in the ever-shifting balance of power. A clever novel that touches on many important issues and has stood the test of time. Not sure I would call it stellar, but surely worth my time and effort.

I never do well when a book is called a ‘classic’, feeling the pressure is always too high that I should like it. I rarely turn to the classics, finding my enjoyment of reading halted when I am supposed to find themes and symbolism. Then again, I love to learn when I read, something Golding does somewhat subtlety with this piece as he speaks about the roles and differences that adolescent boys have within society. The story is both well-paced and overly detailed in places, as Golding seeks to lay the groundwork for a great deal in short order. Some say the downed airplane was part of a nuclear situation that saw the world on the cusp of World War Three, while others surmised it was just a freak accident that left all the adults dead. By thrusting the boys into the role of leaders, Golding posits that their leadership and follower roles would become more apparent over time, though there is a fine line between leading and dictating. As can be seen throughout the piece, the give and take between Ralph and those under him comes to fruition, causing strife and anxiety, which Jack uses to his advantage. The need to survive also pushes the boys to take drastic measures, something they might not normally do, as has been seen in other books and stories of groups stranded and away from help. The use of longer chapters seems needed for Golding to lay some necessary groundwork on different topics. Rather than a constantly evolving flow to the narrative, he chose to tackle these major issues in a single chapter, forcing the reader to push on to understand the concepts being discussed. I suppose it works, but not the approach I might have taken. There were times I also felt the dialogue was slightly jilted, though I am not sure if that is due to the time it was written or a stylistic choice by Golding. I know the way in which young boys speak has devolved of late, but I kept asking myself if I could properly picture boys bantering and ordering one another around in this way. Golding speaks in the introduction about how boys were the only option, that girls could not have played a role in this piece. While I can see what he means, to a degree, wearing my 2020 glasses and not those from 1954, I think much has changed and would love someone to take a stab at the story from the girl-centric approach. I’m sure it would be a refreshing look at this tale that everyone seems to know.

Kudos, Mr. Golding, for a decent read that kept me thinking throughout.

I never do this, but I recently read a novel that takes some influences from Golding’s piece. Do check it out once it is published: The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Golding has said that the genesis of his novel lay in the brutalities he witnessed during his service at sea in world war 2 and in his experiences teaching small boys for 13 years. His use of an obvious but effective symbolism throughout the story allows it to work as an allegory of humanity's fallen nature as well as a graphically realistic scenario.

Read back in high school and I hated. Read while back and still hated. Let me tell you why: This books just feels like a projection of the author's nihilism towards human nature. The characters are ideas not characters.

Also, I learned earlier this year that there was a group of Anglo and Tongan school boys who were shipwrecked way back in the 1960s AND THEY NEVER TURNED VIOLENT AGAINST EACH OTHER!

The books pushes the rhetoric that humans are inherently evil and that children, especially boys (especially spoiled ones, some truth there), can turn vicious almost by nature. Spare me. I know humanity has done bad things, but I don't think we're as inherently bad as William Golding thinks.

In the words of my philosophy professor: "Point to Rousseau, a loss for Hobbes." (Somewhat generalized but you get my point)