Lord of the Flies:
Lord, referencing power and authority.
Flies, referencing something that is rotting. It doesn't get much clearer than that.

In this disturbing look at human nature, a bunch of boys between the ages of 6 and 12 (notice that this is before the age of teenage testosterone rages) crash land on an island. The wreckage left "a scar" on the island (symbolism!!). Ralph and Piggy find a conch (more symbolism!!) and call the others to a meeting. Some of them show up wearing all black (symb.... ok, you get it). One kid wants to be made supreme ruler because he can sing a C#, and another one just wants someone to be named chief so that they can organize and get some stuff done (also notice the difference here in supreme ruler vs a leader of peers). The kids vote for the leader of peers and C# boy will never be happy with that.

The conflicts thereafter show the differences in priorities as extensions of each character's personality. Is it more important to make and maintain a signal fire so that they can be rescued? Is it more important to build shelters? Is it more important to maintain a sense of civilization and rules? Or is it more important to go on pig-slaughtering sprees? In a nutshell, will creating win out over destroying if the boys are left to themselves? And if they get rescued, aren't they simply being taken to a grownup world in the middle of their own war that is as bad as the one that will inevitably happen on the island?

Before long, they are all long-haired, dirty, mostly naked, covered in warpaint, participating in ritualistic dances and animal sacrifices, and beginning to target each other. So, there ya go.

Lord of the Flies not only does an excellent job of exploring human nature, but also making us ask questions about the value of civilization, rules, and identity as well as what effects fear and power have on that system. 5 stars from me, and 2 big thumbs down to leaving any more than 2 children to themselves for more than 5 minutes. They will burn down your island.

Arriva Thomas al tavolo. Schiaffa un fantastico foglio a A4 che titola “Stato di Natura”, sotto una spiegazione breve e concisa. Poi arriva Golding, gli ciula l’a4 e comincia a scriverci la sua storiella. Guarda caso calza tutto a pennello. Hobbes non s’incazza perché alla fine fila quasi tutto liscio secondo ciò che lui andava teorizzando. Vogliam metter poi il leggero contrasto, generato dall’inevitabile candore che la figura dell’infante si porta appresso, con la spietatezza di certe vicissitudini? E i bambini di 6 anni, fastidiosi e assolutamente “in mezzo ai coglioni”?
Il coinvolgimento, il gioco di ruolo, il desiderio e il senso d’appartenenza. Credo che nulla sia esagerato, neanche nei momenti più crudi.
Quasi riuscivo a cucirmi tutto su vecchi ricordi, come credo che ognuno di noi, dopo tanti anni, possa sentirsi in colpa per Piggy.
In qualche modo, se potesse, tornerebbe indietro di una manciata di anni per dargli un forte abbraccio e ascoltarlo un pochino di più.

“Maybe there is a beast... maybe it’s only us.”

Story ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This story shows how people, even the most innocent ones - children - change when there are no rules and no structure.
How they point of view changes, their feelings toward other humans beings or living things in general.
I think the concept and the story itself was really really good, but while reading it, it felt really slowly. The last 10 % were the most shocking and made the story so good.

Writing style ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The writing seemed a little bit plain, but it was still enjoyable.

Lord of the Flies isn't your average book. The setting is predictable for a story - boys stranded on an Island. It's a recipe for a good old fashion adventure novel, right? Except, it's not. It's different. But in a good way? yes and no.

Set in an unspecified period of war, a plane crashes, leaving a group of schoolboys stranded. Shocking, but not that unbearable. After all, the young boys dreams have come true: who wouldn't want a whole island to play on all day without any nagging from the Adults? The unlikely protagonists are Ralph, and his buddy, Piggy. Without any adults, the boys realise that a leader must be elected in order to make sure that everyone has fun and doesn't act unkindly. Ralph ends up being voted in as leader of the pack, he has skills and popularity with the rest of the boys. Ralph befriends a choirboy called Jack, who turns out to be the antagonist in this story. But as time passes a sort of cabin fever kicks in, resulting in a more sinister and unsettling set of actions.

Is this a book about protagonists and/or antagonists? it's really hard to truly define who they are as a group, for you see, Lord of the Flies isn't just a book about boys becoming independent and mentally toughened up. It holds a deeper, more subtle meaning, making the reader question what it really means to be immoral, and the true meaning of evil. It is a book with more depth that it first appears, and it constantly brings up some interesting points. The biggest problem I found was reading it as an older adult, I just never felt the trills and spills, that say, an eleven year old boy would, thus found it hard to really connect with the kids in the same way as a kid reading this would. It is definitely more suited for those still in education, and would make a great read for a boy scout camping out in the wilderness. Should have read it 30 years ago, for better appreciation. Solid storytelling though.

Fenomenalna.

“Maybe,” he said hesitantly, “maybe there is a beast…. What I mean is … maybe it’s only us.”
…
“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”
…
Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.

The setup of Lord of the Flies is as simple as it is iconic. A plane full of boys aged six to twelve crashes on a deserted island. Free from adult supervision, the boys try to set up their own society. But it turns out that “the darkness of man’s heart” is stronger than our better angels, and the boys slowly descend into a murderous mob.

Lord of the Flies is an allegory, with each character essentially an archetype: Ralph the optimistic leader, Piggy the voice of reason, Simon the believer, Jack the power-hungry rival to Ralph, and Roger the truly malevolent. And, of course, there are symbols everywhere: the conch shell, Piggy’s glasses, the signal fire, the beast, and, ultimately, Simon’s vision of the Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Flies was written in the aftermath of World War II, and it carries that same pessimism about humanity that is common to many great novels of that era. The novel works precisely because of that pessimism, because it feels realistic. A group of boys left unsupervised wouldn’t live like Robinson Crusoe. They likely would devolve from order to chaos, from civilization to savagery, from innocence to a face-painted group who torture, hunt, and kill each other. It’s dark and dystopian, yet it reflects and explains so much about the world we live in. Recommended.

Written in the afterword:

The theme for LORD OF THE FLIES is described by Golding as follows (in the same publicity questionnaire): "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except...." - and here I end the quote because it provides spoilers for the ending of the novel. (spoilers after review in spoiler tags if curious for the rest)

After I was 80% or so through with this, I started wondering about why it was such a commonly chosen book required for school reading. Did the teachers and administration mistakeningly assume it would somehow drive home the point that children need adults to remind them of right and wrong, right and fair, honest and true? I would hope that no adult would assume children would get that moral lesson from this text, when we know the truth ourselves, and it is this: that perhaps a group of adults in mixed company, who suddenly faced no law or consequence of action, would be much more terrifying on an island than a group of children.

Maybe they choose the book to show how important society and law can be to keep things in order and not let the wildness take over, although the author seems to disagree with this ideology. He says that despite a logical, respectable system, it can depend on the nature of the individual.

I suppose this book would have been downright boring had the group been comprised of likeminded pacifist individuals who wanted to do coconut shell tea parties over a fire while staying content munching on the island berries.

Instead of that pretty picture, we get a mix of boys who are savages at heart, intent on killing pigs on the island for meat....but really just because they want to kill something. At the heart of it is how one bad seed leads others to corrupt growth, tainting the entire group and turning everyone against each other.

The one lone person with sense was the most bullied, nicknamed "piggy" for his weight issue, scoffed at when his asthma acted up, and was so poorly respected they even took his glasses to make fires. It's possible the author in that day was already speaking against bullying, but it's more likely that it has always been a common issue and often the most rebelled against is the brightest of the bunch in the first place, just that groups are too dim-witted and prejudiced to listen.

It works as a dystopia - it's not in the future, but it's a twisted 'society gone wrong in unusual setting' scenario. The island certainly wasn't utopia - despite how pretty it seemed. And how small was this thing? They made it seem incredibly tiny.

As much as I enjoyed the book - and I did, it was riveting, well-written, with rounded characterization that rang true - I think it would have been interesting to add some more nature elements other than fire and poor pigs. Island snakes are creepy, they did say there were sharks in the water beyond the safe lake-thing area but never mentioned it again - as twisted as it sounds, I kind of wanted a wild bore to show at least one of the savages who was boss since they were so relentlessly after the pigs. Even if the author wrote it to focus on the nature of man overriding civilization's best intentions, it would have been even more tense to add some of that in the mix before their little group started falling apart. Even if no one was hurt, the suspense of it would have made the story more gripping than it already was.

I enjoyed how - instead of just having the sides of leadership struggling for dominance, followers unsure who to follow, and a breakdown of civilization - they also had a fear of an unknown element they called 'the beast.' It wouldn't have been realistic for them, especially as children, not to have a least one overriding fear to help shape them. I think most civilizations were originally shaped from fear as they formed themselves anyway.

Overall, whether schools want you to read it or not, it's a worthy classic. I'm curious on reading more from the author since I dug his writing style and appreciate his honest look at the subject.

Rest of quote from author on theme that reveals the ending n   The whole book is symbolic in nature except....the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?"n

And this was beyond creepy -

”They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.”

So this was a book many people had to read when they went to school and in some way this already says a lot about “Lord of the Flies”. Like so many of the books that are required to be read during people’s educational careers this one wasn’t only full of serious topics but also dealt with ethical values.

I mean we have boys between the ages of 6 and 12 who are stranded on an island after they had a plane crash. There is no adult who would force them to stay in line; there is no authority that would tell them what's right or wrong. They are left to their own devices and even though they were doing as good as you would expect schoolboys to do, they still were fairly decent at the beginning of the book.

“I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are the best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”

Oh, how often I thought back to this quote when I read on with horror, every new chapter revealing another aspect of the dark abyss of human kind. The morale dilemma of Ralph and Piggy was so intense that I couldn’t help but feel with them whenever something bad and terrible happened. They were the only ones that tried to get order into the chaos but on an island without any rules only the strongest remain.

”I got you meat!”
Numberless and inexpressible frustrations combined to make his rage elemental and awe-inspiring. “I painted my face – I stole up. Now you eat – all of you – and I –“

The fight of savageness vs. civilisation was so tangible it hurt and I constantly found myself sitting at the edge of my seat hoping against all hope, that civilisation would actually win. It doesn’t take a genius to know that it didn’t. Why hold on to moral standards? Why listen to reason if you can have a kingdom of your own? Why should you accept someone else’s opinion if you’re stronger and can force them to obey your own rules? You know it better than the others, right?!

”If I blow the conch and they don’t come back; then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.”

I know I’m being provocative here but it is how it is. The strongest will always try to rule the weak. It’s been done for centuries and I doubt that it will ever stop. It’s as much a part of human nature as breathing and let’s face the bitter truth: There’s darkness in all of us. We can only decide if we fight it or let it in. ;-)

”Look, Ralph. We got to forget this. We can’t do no good thinking about it, see?”
“I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. O god I want to go home.”

”The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream. There aren’t any beasts to be afraid of on this island.”

If you ask me there certainly was a monster on the island or should I rather say that there were monsters? n  Plural.n It weren’t monsters that had been there all along though. No, it were the monsters that had fallen from the sky, claiming the island as their own, doing as they pleased because they could do so without anyone to stop them. The monsters on the island came from the outside and despite their claims to want to get off of the island they all knew that they actually wanted to stay.

”I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.”

So in the end things took their natural course and got worse and worse. The descent into savageness was inexorable and the book ended on a heavy note. I can only speak for myself but the ending was brilliant. Brilliant and shocking and so very, very realistic that it caused me to ache even more. Those stupid boys... those stupid, stupid little boys. *shakes head*

Anyway, if you want to read a really good book which will haunt you days after you finished it, this should be your choice. *lol* After all I finished “Lord of the Flies” almost a week ago and I’m still thinking about it. ;-)

Happy Reading! I hope you’ll enjoy it as well!

Those are two quotes that were perfect and moved me so damn much when I read the book. Because they would spoil too much and would give away some crucial parts of the plot I didn’t write them down in the actual review though.
Anyway if you read the book already you might as well enjoy them now:

”Piggy.”
“Uh?”
“That was Simon.”
“You said that before.”
“Piggy.”
“Uh?”
“That was murder.”

”And in the middle of them, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

1.75

Interesting story. For me it doesn't hold up by current day tastes. It's definitely a parable or allegory of social mores, how man once left without social structure degenerates to base instincts. I liked it well enough but would have preferred more details in order for it to work. There was a plane crash? Where was the wreckage? It describe the path cut in the jungle but doesn't describe the wreckage or how the children survived. Skipped right over that part. The kids just appear on the beach. The author, I think was too en rapt with the symbolism and theme rather than telling the story. For example, everyone eats fruit but there is never a description of the fruit or how they eat it, what it tastes like. The author flies over all these sort of details and focuses on proving his theme.
David Putnam author of the Bruno Johnson series.

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).

This book will forever haunt me and be forever intertwined with my freshman year of high school. Its a great book for a classroom and was where I was first taught symbolism in a way that really stood out to me. This book is so rich in literary devices I remember it being the first moment where I realized the art of reading and writing as something far beyond storytelling and how much careful craft brings a work to life. I was hooked, I think from that moment on I had it in my mind that to be someone who analyzes literature was a rock-star type vocation to me. But I will also never forget the way it was taught. Our teacher, who I remain close friends with to this day, had us play a simulation for two days where we were in the same situation as the kids in the book (before we began the book) and had to discuss and plan how to organize our lives to survive on this island. Think Model UN but for Lord of the Flies.

Reader: it was chaos. Everyone made bad deals or broke deals finding it funny to screw people over, multiple people clamored over who was in charge, people such as myself bounced from group to group doing devious deals or gossiping about what other groups were doing (I have always been a gossip queen), and by the second day we were all shouting at each other and feeling like we had somehow been so bad at this game that the teacher would never have his class play it again. Which, at that age, is sort of a mark of pride to some and so once the chaos began those few gleefully pushed for more chaos. Our teacher never interjected, only watched from afar while grading our exams from the previous week--a brilliant time management idea I've come to realize.

Finally our teacher stepped in. We eagerly awaited hearing we were terrible at this and fully destroyed the purpose of it, only to hear that this was what happened almost every single year. And then we read the book, which felt like looking into a mirror. Chilling moment to be confronted with yourself that way. He did this game every year until he retired, it's quite often cited as a favorite memory from high school for those who were there.