Crtique On Lord Of The Flies Essay, Research Paper

Lord of The Flies is one of the best-known books of the post-war years. A group of young boys, the oldest of whom is twelve, and the youngest six, are marooned on a desert island, and almost immediately a battle for supremacy takes place among the principal characters. Violence and death follow. The schoolboys are in a plane which has been shot down during what the reader assumes is a war set in the near future. Generically, therefore, Lord of the Flies can be seen as a dystopian or anti- utopian novel.

During an atomic war, an aircraft carrying a group of about thirty pre-adolescent boys crashes on an inhabited coral island in the Pacific. The crew has been killed, and the boys are left on their own. They begin to collect themselves into a society of food gatherers under their elected chief, Ralph. A routine of duties is arranged and, at first, the boys live peacefully. Soon, however, differences arise as to their priorities. The smaller children lose interest in their tasks, the older boys want to spend more time hunting than carrying out more routine duties such as stoking the fire and building shelters. A rumor spreads that a “beast” is lurking in the forest and the children have nightmares. Jack, promising to fulfill the children’s desire for a reversion to primitivism, is chosen as the new chief, and the two society splits into two sections: those who hunt and who become savages, and those who believe in rational conduct. Ralph gradually finds himself an outcast, and in the end the army of hunters tracks him down on orders from Jack. Just as Ralph is about to be killed by the “savages,” a naval officer arrives with a rescue party.

Certainly the novel Lord of the Flies is a pessimistic one. Although the boys begin by electing a leader, Ralph, and call frequent meetings, using a conch shell as a symbol of authority, their attempts at re-creating “civilization” quickly founder. Jack Merridew, who is in charge of the hunting, rapidly assumes dominance over the boys, exploiting their superstitions of fear of the “beast”, and he eventually leaves Ralph’s group, taking most of the boys with him. When Simon, a visionary youth, realizes that the “beast” is just a dead parachutist and attempts to communicate this knowledge to the other boys, Jack’s “tribe” ritualistically murder him. Piggy, the first of numerous rationalist figures, is murdered by Jack’s lieutenant, Roger, while he pathetically holds on to the conch, still believing in civilization. Ralph, now completely alone, is hunted like an animal by the other boys, who clearly intend to sacrifice him when they catch him. The forest is set on fire in order to smoke Ralph out and, just as he is about to be killed, and English ship sees the smoke and sends a rescue party.

Near the beginning of the novel, the island is looked upon as a utopia by the reader, and the children. This is a place where there is peace and tranquillity, which is often associated with the sound of the ocean waves, and the abundance of nature, surrounding them. The island is a place where at first there is no evil, and wrong-doing, away from the war, and all the problems in the city. However, this island, during the progression of the novel, begins to twist into a dystopia, where at first there was only good, and happiness, becomes a place of blood and death – ultimately a place of horror.

The novel is usually read as Golding’s commentary upon human evil, and almost certainly it would not have been written had Belsen and Auschwitz never existed.

Evil lies firmly outside the English schoolboys in this book and is made manifest by savage, black cannibals. In Lord of the Flies Golding has one of the boys say, “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything.” But throughout the novel Golding overturns this optimistic portrait, which equates English with good and foreign with evil, and suggests that evil is more likely to reside within humanity, including the English, and that “external evil is a protection of an inner evil.”

Golding’s characters are also used to portray sharply differing points of view on the nature of evil, and the means of placating this powerful force. For Piggy, there is no such thing as evil, it is just people behaving irrationally. For Jack, evil resides outside humanity and must be placated by various forms of sacrifice, and for Simon, “Evil expresses itself in the words of the Lord of the Flies: evil is inside humanity.”

Golding informs his readers immediately that the context of his characters’ lives is specifically Christian, ‘”I ought to be chief.” said Jack with simple arrogance, “because I’m chapter chorister and head boy.”‘ The choir is a specifically religious institution and yet it is Jack and his hunters who became the most cruel and violent of all the boys on the island. In Lord of the Flies, therefore, there is a divine manifestation of the disturbing connection between religion, violence and blood sacrifice that Golding examines in close detail. As the novel progresses, one constantly encounters this connection and must wonder if Jack and his choir become hunters and sacrificers of other human beings despite their obvious Christian origins, or because of them.

That Lord of the Flies does move us forward is something that few reader would deny. It is as fine an adventure story as many published since the war, and yet Golding’s ability to employ language which both provides narrative impetus and also evokes profounder, more theological, implications is demonstrated immediately: ‘Taking their cue from the innocent Johnny, they sat down on the fallen palm tree and waited’ (Golding, 1954, p. 19). The novel is spare, deliberate in its intentions, and certainly Golding himself has little hesitation in referring to it as a ‘fable’.

The plane crash is not only a plausible device to isolate the boys, but is also essential as a commentary on the world outside the island. The novel is and examination of not of distinctive nature of small boys, but of the essential nature of humanity itself, the heart of darkness. The island becomes a microcosm of the adult world, which is also destroying itself. The grim account of amendment and murder on the island, is re-enacted in the greater world continuously, and this interaction between the two worlds is powerfully dramatized in the character the dead parachutist.

Bewildered and frightened, the children yearn for a sign from the adult world, but the sign that is sent is fraught with meaning, possessing a symbolic power which persists throughout the novel. The dead parachutist himself is a scapegoat, a victim of the war which rages as the adults’ madness increases on a scale minutely reflected by the boys on the island. “In his essay ‘Crabbed Youth and Age’, Golding refers to the millions of young men who were slaughtered during the First World War and ‘the pure and blameless, the eternally sacrificed’”. The dead parachutist is also invested with some of this eternal quality, and yet in this novel, the children are given the chance to externalize their apprehension of evil. It is the parachutists rotting presence which allows the boys to ignore Simon’s suggestion, “What I mean is…maybe it’s only us.”

Upon their coming to the island the boys are all ready to work together and make laws and rules so that they remain “civilized”. they have taken the utopian point of view where there are no adults to rule over them, and this island is perhaps similar to a park, or playground, where children make the rules, and adults can only watch from the outside. Regardless, the island belongs to them, and that being their “playground” gives them each a sense of freedom, and the space to do as they please.

It is only when things start to lose order that they seek help from an adult, in asking themselves the question ‘what would an adult do now?’ Jack and his hunters are the first to ask themselves this question near the beginning of the book, but near the end, it seems as if they have lost complete knowledge of everything but what happens on the island, and the island itself. Still, one can argue that these children still do believe in the wisdom of adults, because of the fact that they chose the oldest, and the smartest boys as their leaders; Ralph who was the oldest, he is the first one to speak and introduce himself to the others, (although Piggy seems to be the more intelligent one of the two, yet not as outspoken) and Jack, who is also mature at age, and in addition the leader of the choir.

This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack started to protest but the clamour changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and his attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart.

“Him with the shell!” (Golding, 1954, p. 24)

Golding writes, “Inside a fairy tale or out of it, a severed head is a powerful affair.” This is dramatized in Lord of the Flies when the hunters place the severed head of a pig in the clearing. To the hunters this offering is one of making amends – they have projected evil outside themselves. However, Simon realizes that the severed head is an permanent part of humanity. “At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition.” When Simon attempts to communicate his knowledge that the parachutist is a pathetic victim of a larger war and that evil is internal, he is torn to pieces by Jack’s tribe. Similarly, when Piggy tries to reason with the boys he is killed. There is construction of a complex metaphorical system around Piggy, the conch shell, and his glasses being the most important. For Piggy, who has intelligence, but no intuitive powers, the conch is order, and he fails to realize that the conch in itself is nothing, a literally hollow shell, unless the others agree on its symbolic powers. When Jack’s tribe steals his glasses to make fire and Piggy stands among them, blind, fat, and trembling his words (almost his last) and genuinely tragic in their uncomprehending innocence, “I tell you, I got the conch!”

The characters seen in the novel as hunters and killers are only children, while at the end, the officer’s patronizing air alerts the reader to the fact that precisely the same horrors are being re-enacted in the adult world. Ralph is blinded by tears, his bitter understanding of the evil that resides within humanity. Also there is a darkly ironic counterpart to the officer’s helpful comment, “I know. Jolly good show. Like The Coral Island.” Here near the end of the novel, the island has become a dystopia, which is what the officer does not understand. His comparing of these children’s situation to The Coral Island (which is a utopian novel) is completely ironic.

Just as these boys tried to find inner peace and utopia on this island, which in appearance can be deceiving, the same is desired from all individuals. The only problem lies here: there is no such place, because even when found, this utopia begins to twist into a repulsive mirror image, where there is nothing left there that could remotely be considered utopian.