Lord of the flies.

Plot & characters.

Lord of the flies, written in 1954 by William Golding, starts with the crashing of an airplane
on an isolated island, in which the only survivors are boys in their childhood.
In the beginning, we meet Ralph, the protagonist, a natural leader who instantly becomes the
island's authority; and we meet Piggy, the voice of reason and intelligence, but whose figure
is not respected. Other characters worth mentioning are Jack, the image of savagery and
rebellion, who becomes the antagonist later on, and Simon, a mysterious character who
depicts innocence while being the most clever and aware of humankind.

As soon as the boys get to the island, they try to imitate their lives back home. They make an
assembly thanks to a conch that Ralph and Piggy found used to maintain the order on the
island. In this first assembly, Ralph gets elected as the chief. And as a chief, he makes some
rules, the most important: they’ll have to maintain a fire to make smoke signals and be
rescued.

Everything starts going downwards when Jack and his hunters ignore that rule. They
preferred to go hunting instead of keeping the fire, thus letting it die at the worst moment; a
boat had been near the island when there weren’t smoke signals. Ralph gets truly mad after
this, he tries to make the hunters understand that the fire is their top priority, but the hunters
have discovered a more fun activity than keeping the fire: hunting.
The hunting of the pigs represents the thirst of blood growing in the kids, they’re not only
killing a pig but the civilized and balanced life.

We understand the title of the story when a pig’s head is impaled in a stick, and called the
Lord of the Flies. There’s a reason for this madness: the beast.
The beast is a product of paranoia and a representation of the children’s fear of the unknown.
Simon thinks that the beast is themselves, the beast isn’t real, the most dangerous thing on the
island are these little kids. And this is proven true when he is murdered after being confused
as the beast.

We are near the conclusion: Piggy and Simon are dead, Jack has taken control, and Ralph’s
authority has collapsed. It is towards the end of the book that we finally see the true nature of
humankind, the evilness of these kids that, as a last resort, decide to hunt Ralph. In this last
part, Ralph is trying to decipher who is trying to hunt him, but he can’t see kids any more:
their previously civilized self in appearance, behavior, and values are gone.

The book has technically a happy ending, the kids are found by a British officer and finally
rescued.
Major theme: human evilness.
Lord of the Flies explores this topic with the most extreme examples: kids. Children are the
peak of innocence, they haven’t been in the world enough time to understand it, and their
brains are still young and inexperienced. One could also say that kids lack morals since
distinguishing good and bad is a product of education.
In this context, corruption of children is portrayed as pretty extreme but in the end, it could be
a comparison to the Coming of Age experience, where kids become adults.
The question that Golding raises is: are humans evil by nature? or are the conditions that
make humans manifest evilness? The answer doesn’t have to be so black and white: to me, it
is a mix of both. Humans being evil by nature doesn’t mean that every single human is a “bad
person”, but if you press the wrong buttons, every single one of us can become monsters.

Personal opinion.
I chose this book because I generally enjoy classics, however I didn’t quite like this one. The
plot development was too slow for me, not much happened until the last chapters of the book.
The dialogues are not enjoyable since it seems like the kids can’t express themselves well
(which makes sense), and the description of surroundings is really so consistent it becomes a
burden. Even if I didn’t like the prose of the book, the topic is a really interesting one: it
makes you reflect about humans and their nature. I would not recommend it to everyone but
at the end, I think it is a book everyone should read at least once in their lifetimes.