Lord of the Flies
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- GKCfan
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Re: Lord of the Flies
- marokee
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That being said, I did like the story of survival, instinct, and good v. evil themes throughout.
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From what I recall of the book, yes I would consider it a dystopian society. The definition for me doesn't require it to be set in a traditional society. These children created what tragically went downhill. I suppose it could have easily spiraled into a utopia as well, but I need to reread it as I mentioned above.GKCfan wrote:Do you consider this a "dystopian" novel, or something else, because it's set away from traditional society?
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- DATo
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Golding's book, The Lord Of The Flies (1954) was meant to serve as an expose' of human nature in its primal state. It was also meant as a scathing attack and rebuttal to another novel about children - The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) by R.M. Ballantyne. In Ballantyne's book the children, who are also isolated on an island without adult supervision, have a wonderful time and revel in many adventures.
Golding's use of children to depict the primal state of human nature was a stroke of genius. He is making the statement that "evil" is INHERENT in human nature and is not the result of acquired conditioning resulting from exposure to evil behavior in others. We consider children to be untainted by evil and innocent, but in reality the children in the novel are exhibiting the same traits as the adults beyond our purview during the time frame of the novel - adults who are engaged in war.
The Beast is revealed to the character, Simon, who is represented as a sort of mystic in an epiphany resulting from his encounter with a pig head stuck on a spike which is covered with flies. In Simon's reverie he imagines that the pig head speaks to him and reveals that The Beast is not some monster lurking in the jungle, but rather the tendency to evil lurking within the children themselves. Simon, much like Jesus, attempts to take this revelation to the others, and like Jesus is martyred for his efforts.
Golding is careful to illustrate that these boys are not just typical boys chosen at random, but boys from a British public (American translation = exclusive / private) school. This is a nice stroke of craftsmanship on Golding's part. The British public school system has traditionally been the educational system of choice for children from "upper crust" families. These schools were meant to produce the future leaders of the British government, industry and military. Golding is trying to push the case that these boys are not rowdies but are part of a class that is being processed to be "gentlemen". Another stroke of genius, in my opinion, is Golding's choice of using children to illustrate his point. As I mentioned earlier we equate children with innocence. Children, we assume, do not yet have enough exposure to life experience to be tainted by that which we would call "evil".
What Golding is saying, loudly and clearly in this story is that even the most innocent people, when separated from the trappings of civilized society for any length of time, can revert to the primal and instinctive behavior which has been inculcated into their psyche over countless millennia of evolutionary attrition. My Grandmother used to quote an old saying from Italy: "Children are the purest for they are the last to arrive from the hand of God." But as we get older - stray farther from the hand of God - (using my grandmother's metaphor) we become corrupted by the world. In this book, as time passes, children who at first draw upon their training to organize themselves by setting up a makeshift parliamentary government and a plan of action which includes a signal fire to aid their rescue, quickly begin to revert to what we would expect of primitive cultures including the premise that "might makes right", to the invention of superstitious beliefs (the Beast in the jungle), sacrifice to evil gods to appease them (the pig head on the spike) and even to murder if considered necessary.
At the end of the book adult life appears. The adult is a British naval officer and he thinks the children have been playing a game. He is totally unaware when he finds the children that they are pursuing one of the other boys with the intention of killing him. Thus, Golding is illustrating that the "innocent" boys have reverted to, and are in fact engaged in, the same behavior as the people in the world from which the naval officer has just arrived - a world of violence and war.
Golding gradually strips these specially educated boys of the training they have received and the trappings of civilized life. He is making the case that our instinctive, banal propensities to revert to primitive and animal behavior lurk just beneath the surface of what appears to be our otherwise disguised, civilized appearance.
― Steven Wright
- Fran
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Excellent post & most interesting as always.
LOTF was first published in 1954, 9 years after the horrors of the Nazi regime had come to light, and I have always felt Golding was highlighting that the Nazi regime were not some kind of freak aberration of the German people but that the veneer of civilisation is so thin that similar horrors can manifest in any society and I think he was warning that the norms of civilisation must be nurtured,defended & protected or we risk a revertion to what Thomas Hobbes described as a life that, for the average person, would be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
A world is born again that never dies.
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- DATo
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You offer some excellent insights and I find myself agreeing with you. In Leviathan Hobbes argues for a strong central government which, in his day of course, would be in support of the prevailing monarchy. Though Hobbes does not use these terms I think he is putting forth the argument that even tyranny is preferable to chaos. Plato echoes this view when he states that the masses cannot be trusted to rule themselves and that pure democracy would result in chaos.
Your comments regarding the Nazi regime parallel thoughts to which I have given a great deal of consideration, and which I think are applicable to Golding's novel, if only tangentially. Man is a social animal. He learned early-on that there was an advantage to living in commune with his fellows - that his individual advantage was multiplied by working in consort with others. Probably long before he became homo sapiens he was living in communities structured upon kin relationship, in other words, "clans". Of course when his group encountered another group of this kind the two strongest, natural, prime imperatives which had become established over millions of years of evolutionary conditioning, (fear and greed) kicked in. They were a "different" group, therefore they were both a threat and/or potential victims for exploitation. I believe this is where our current attitudes leading to conflict arise, whether the result of religious, racial, cultural or even language differences we always seem to view others with an "us vs them" attitude. Hitler exploited these deep-seated natural impulses in post WWI Germany in the form of his nationalistic bombastics.
In Lord Of The Flies we have Hobbes' position represented by Ralph's faction. Jack's faction represented the raw and base dictates of natural law - a refutation of civil law and order - a dictatorship.
― Steven Wright
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