William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is one of the most classic pieces of American literature written during the 20th century. A required reading for most high school students, and chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 best English novels between 1923 and 2005; the book is an important aspect of American and Western society and as such demands a particular investigation. The novel is listed as number 31 in the top 100 Best Novels by the Modern Library, and reached 25 on the recommended reading list. Not a great success at the time of publication, the importance and themes of the novel became more pronounced during the Counter-Culture years of the 1960s. By the 1990s, it was standard reading material chosen by English teachers and professors across the country.
The overall context of the novel is that of a perceived third World War following a minor conflict in Great Britain. The boys trapped on the island are products of circumstances beyond their own choosing: their school transport plane is shot down, either by ground or air fire. The result is the death of their only adults, the pilots, and the emergence of what seems to be a paradise island for the boys. Very quickly, the lack of adults becomes the lack of civil order. Golding's use of the characters throughout the novel is a consistent battle between the subconscious human conceptualizations of civility and savagery. It is Golding's prime question: What is the dominant instinct in humanity; a desire for order or a desire to control and dominate?
Golding's instincts are played out by opposing boys, Jack who represents disorder and a lack of authority, and Ralph who represents the inner drive to hold onto those very things that make us human: love, community, cooperation. The scenario is very similar to end-of-the-world scenarios portrayed by apocalyptic films such as Night of the Living Dead and A Boy and His Dog. In each scenario the situation is the same: characters are forced to inevitably choose between their desires. Upon choosing civility and order, the expression of pride and community support is the main continence of the characters. Upon choosing disorder and anarchy, the characters are dominated and motivated by factors of fear and coercion. In certain respects, Golding makes a correlation to the Cold War; a world divided into separate camps that view each other in a similar light. The Soviet Union believed to be upholding civility and progressive order while Capitalism in the West controlled its people through coercion and manipulation. Likewise the West believed to be upholding civility and order through democracy, while the Communist East controlled its people through fear. The more direct analysis of Golding's characters however are relatable to the subconscious desires that burden all of mankind.
Biological science has shown, with astute accuracy, that the human mind is in the Platonic sense a 'slave to the senses.' We can only see whatever light our eyes will take in, only hear the sound vibrations that can be picked up by our eardrum, and only smell a few hundred chemicals with our olfactory nodes. The full light spectrum, the full sound wave, and every chemical in existence is thus beyond our understanding. We are, by nature, limited to our cognitive experiences with the material world. In this sense, Plato's analysis of our experiences can seem very true: We know only what we experience. How then, does one explain the existence of a violent, anarchistic, and savage side of humanity that seems prevalent not only through Golding's novel but also through history as well? Golding uses the dark, harsh, and scarlet-doused image of the Lord of the Flies, a severed pigs head thrust upon a wooden stake, to emphasize and drive forth the extent to which savagery can affect the human mind. But Golding does not try to suggest that this instinct or drive is created by experience, like Plato would. Rather Golding asserts that these instincts and motivations exist within us all, waiting to be unearthed at the right time.
The theme of civility against savagery thus coincides with the notion of a human's loss of innocence. For Golding, it is innocence that keeps mankind bound together in the same way that eggs bind meat together when cooking. Without the eggs (innocence), the meat becomes easily fragmented, distorted, and is more susceptible to decay. But the one aspect uncontrollable by either the author or the innocence, is how each individual person is posed to deal with it. Golding's exemplification of this is his portrayal of different-aged boys with different backgrounds, thus each coming with their own personal understandings of right and wrong. It is here where Aristotelian philosophy now pokes its head in: We all come together as separate individuals, all each bound by our Platonic sense of existence. Some of the boys, such as Jack, lose their innocence with the immediate loss of an authority (the adults). Others, such as Piggy and Simon, battle with and against their innocence throughout the novel. Ralph maintains his innocence while also maintaining pride in it, thus representing the last element of humanity left in the boys. Finally, the younger boys of the island are presented as too young to fully understand, and thus they benignly follow whoever seems to be in the seat of command.
Ultimately we are presented with the haunting notion asserted by Golding through his character Simon, that goodness and civility can be perceived as impediments to the social disorder of anarchy and savagery. Whereas Jack and Ralph stand at the polarized sides of civility and savagery, Simon exists somewhere on his own plane. Simon embodies an innate, spiritual goodness that is in many ways as primal as Jack's own savagery. Simon upholds civility as a natural part of his existence, while the other boys, who are not innately moral, uphold civility as products of the adult world: their support for morality comes from threat of punishment. Finally, a Marxist analysis begins to look back at us through Golding's words. While Jack and Simon may represent idealistic interpretations of morality, Golding does assert the affect of material conditions on the consciousness of his characters: the boys who are moral do so because of their experiences with the adult world. It is not an inner drive for morality that makes them obey, it is rather the threat of punishment that coerces their actions.
Simon's character is murdered by the savage boys who feel threatened by his upstanding support of morality. More importantly, it is Simon who discovers the truth of the island: There is no Lord of the Flies; it is merely the 'savage' side of consciousness talking to the subconscious. Simon's experience with the severed pig's head forces him to reject the savage attempt to dominate his mind, and reveal this truth to the rest of the boys. The other boys however, led by Jack, had already fully succumbed to their savage instincts and the notion of its fault brings about the insecurity of their social order as a whole. Their only means then, of preserving that reality, of upholding their desires for savagery and brutal survival, is to murder Simon. Simon's death becomes Golding's principle metaphor for the death of natural morality, and the supremacy of savagery over our instincts for civility.
The end of the text is not without its twist of irony however. Throughout the novel, Golding uses the island as a metaphor for a staging area that exists outside the realm of civilization. What if, the book begs to ask, human beings were placed in a situation lacking a central authority? What would guide us? What would bring us together? Golding's answer rests with the idea that survival becomes dictated by our savage side, while cooperation for survival necessitates aspects of civility. At the end of the novel however, and the boys are rescued, that all-too-dominant existence of a social morality breaks down Golding's metaphor. Upon the image of an adult in military uniform, all the boys are immediately reminded of their tragedies and their transgressions. As if within a matter of seconds, the world of civility had been washed over their consciousnesses and their ability to discern right from wrong fell directly into place.
Golding's novel makes a critical attempt to understand the consciousness of mankind through the lens of an idealistic setting. This setting however, cannot ignore its own specific context: it is isolated from civilization. More importantly, the boys' isolation is a product of civilization's ongoing savagery: a war. Civilization itself may be a product of such a development between savagery and morality, but is an idealistic interpretation of the mind an accurate picture of humanity as a whole? While it is undeniable that savagery and morality both exist within each of us, we cannot, in the Platonic sense, express those existences freely without worry of conflict. We are all products of our surroundings, and our understanding of morality is, like most of the boys in the novel, based on experiences with civilization itself...as opposed to any inert instinct for 'good'. Thus, it is not so much important to understand the material existence of an inert 'savagery' or 'morality' within each individual, as much as it is to understand the material existence of an inert savagery or morality within all individuals, as a collective, throughout civilization as a whole.
