Read it Again: William Golding's Lord of the Flies
You probably read it in high school. But like many such books, it's got a second life when you read it as an adult.
The “darkness of man’s heart” is not a light subject. And so even though I’ve taught William Golding’s Lord of the Flies somewhere seventeen or eighteen times – however many years as I’ve been assigned to freshmen – I’ve always been a little unnerved by the novel’s ominous, menacing subtexts. It is, for many students, the first truly intense literary exploration of human savagery. Sure, it’s lost on many of them. But it scares the living hell out of the handful of fifteen-year-olds sophisticated enough to understand it deeply. For those few, it’s a literary abyss that stares back at them – a gaping maw that spews a rancid, brooding, lamentable truth about our own capacity for cruelty. And that’s all the more frightening since it might be their first real confrontation with this enormous existential disappointment. It’s a despairing story, fraught with the naked exposure of our basest instincts. I’ve seen this crushing realization in the eyes of those freshmen who truly get it. Most of them don’t, but you can tell it’s gnawing at them on the periphery in some uncanny way, even if they don’t quite know why.
And that’s why we should read it again at a later, less tender age. Years ago, I asserted that Lord of the Flies would best be taught to seniors in high school. Some colleagues in the English department rolled their eyes, but the truth in my mind is that a “near adult” is far better suited to savor the dark, bitter flavor of this savage exposé. Seventeen-year-olds have a finer grasp of the themes Golding treats – at least, they've had a bit more time to stew in these dark forces and ruminate upon their unfortunate effects. But I’d go so far as to say that even more comprehension awaits the adult reader: the reader old enough to have traveled far from the innocence of childhood – and thus to truly appreciate it. To feel, on a visceral level, the hollowness of its absence. The adult reader who is old enough to know that even though our tween and teen years were in many ways a mess as we confronted our encroaching adulthood, that we were far closer to innocent back then.
I wrote a paper about the novel during my postgraduate work at St. Andrew’s in Scotland twenty years ago. It was called “The Voice of Experience in Fiction.” Here’s an excerpt:
After the end of his military career, Golding moved on to take a position as a schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. A boys’ preparatory school, it was another arena for Golding to observe the habits and interactions of boys in groups. This time, of course, they would be in early to mid-adolescence, younger than the soldiers and sailors he observed during the war. During his teaching years, Golding was witness to the competition, bravado, camaraderie, and occasional cruelty of boys growing up. As Anthony Barrett, a pupil of Golding’s recalled, “I was in a position to observe him in the casual way that schoolboys do observe their masters. Whether he was aware of me I do not know, but the author of Lord of the Flies must have been observing schoolboys much more profoundly” (Carey, 27). Ian McEwan recalls his first reading of the novel as a schoolboy himself: “…I knew these boys. I knew what they were capable of. I had seen us at it. As far as I was concerned, Golding’s island was a thinly disguised boarding school.” He goes on to describe the challenges of being a schoolboy: “As a contemporary of Ralph, Piggy, and Jack, I felt intimately acquainted with their problems…We were at an age when we craved secret societies, codes, invented rituals and hierarchies; [but] these all needed talking through before the fun could begin and countless elements conspired to subvert us: pure excitement, competitiveness, aggression, horseplay, power play, boasting…we could not organize a thing among ourselves…Golding knew all about us” (158). Golding knew about boys. And he knew that all men were once boys.
He blended, it seems, his observations of schoolboys and men at war, boiling these people down to their basic human essences. What they have in common, if we observe his characters on the island, is a remarkable ingenuity matched with equal capacities for compassion and cruelty. He seems to profile human nature by taking various elements and distributing them among various boys. At one end of the spectrum we see Roger, the embodiment of cynicism and cruelty, with his blind allegiance to Jack and his disregard for human life. He leans on the stick and sends the fateful boulder on its trajectory toward Piggy. At the opposite end we meet Simon, the gentle, insightful mystic possessed of intense clarity of thought and pre-eminent understanding of the truth, but weakened by the physical ailment of his fainting spells. He is devoured by the metaphoric Beast, savagely murdered in a fit of blind, exhilarating bloodlust during the hunters’ war dance on the beach. Darkly enough, his death comes at the same moment when he is ironically trying to deliver the redeeming truth that the “beastie” is nothing but a dead pilot.
Jack and Ralph seem at first quite similar: two charismatic, physically strong boys with the authority to lead. Ralph’s authority, of course, is based in true gravitas and his ability to reason. Jack’s, on the other hand, lies with appealing to the basest instincts of his fellow boys, and that ultimately wins him the stronger following. Piggy is perhaps the most tragic and pathetic figure, providing the clear voice of reason when Ralph’s resolve falters; but Piggy’s “authority” (which extends only so far as Ralph’s reliance upon him) is a tenuous one, his personality and reason the last bastion of a peace that is as fragile as the conch itself.
The true darkness of Golding’s self-described analysis of mankind’s nature lies with the fact that the most obviously “good” characters – Ralph, Piggy, and Simon – do not fare well at all. Piggy and Simon are killed outright, and Ralph cannot resist the occasional descent into cruelty. Each of these characters falls victim to the Beast on Golding’s island. The Beast, Golding implies, is intrinsic to them, an element of their humanity. It is their capacity for cruelty, their inclination toward savagery, their unbridled hormonal outburst of carnal bloodlust – the “thick excitement” that so seduces even Ralph. Every voice that stands for reason, restraint, and civility – Piggy’s, Simon’s, and Ralph’s – is mercilessly savaged. Of these three, only Ralph escapes murder, but his redemption is darkly ironic; he falls at the foot of a Royal Navy officer. This is a man himself caught up in the gears of an unprecedented, efficient machine of savagery: the fictional nuclear war that precipitated the boys’ evacuation from England in the first place.
The novel traces the rapid descent from a particularly English sense of order on the island to that of utter chaos, with half of the jungle in flames and the boys reduced to naked savages. If a group of virgin schoolboys, uncorrupted even by middle adolescence, let alone the vices of adulthood, can fall victim to man’s inherent capacity for savagery, can’t we all? Golding’s conclusion (echoed in Ralph’s thoughts) about “the end of innocence and the darkness of a man’s heart” seems a fitting observation based on his experiences. He was writing what he knew, what he had lived. He was affected by the war, and incredibly distressed by its implications for mankind. While the “explanation” he offers is not an attractive one, he proposes it nonetheless as an explanation, an argument for why the war happened: we are inherently capable of great cruelty, inclined toward violence, and generally incapable of suppressing our most carnal desires. The few that are so capable might just be devoured by the others.
Gees. Sounds like a miserable reading experience, right? Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But it is. Read it again, primarily, for the excellent writing and Golding’s astute use of precise language. Read it again to recognize just how presient the novel is in contemporary media culture: Lost, Survivor, et cetera. Read it again to savor the redeeming virtue that does persist among the strongest of the boys. Read it again to feel the heart-pounding suspense and raw, hormonal energy that crackles like a dangerous, arcing conduit between the minds and hearts of those lost, frightened kids. Read it again to realize that today’s political divisiveness is really nothing new, and that base tribalism is as old as the human condition. Read it again to marvel at Golding’s masterful portrayal of human nature at the extremes – and the primeval struggle between good and evil that faces us at our moments of deepest, most honest self-awareness.
I’ll be offering an occasional post like this that revisits a book you may well have read in high school, and offer some perspectives on its relevance later in life.
You've about got me talked into giving it another go. (I've been an avid reader as long I could read, but reflexively hated every book they made us read in high school. Revisited To Kill a Mockingbird a few years ago and discovered it's brilliant. Re-read The Great Gatsby decently after seeing the current Broadway show and still dislike the book. We'll see how Lord of the Flies goes!)
Sold. First up next after my Dostoyevsky binge.