Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Reassessing a high-school staple

First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies was the debut novel of English author William Golding, who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. Like almost everybody else in America, I read Lord of the Flies in high school. A few decades later, having forgotten most of the details, I decided to give it a reread. I discovered that, as a middle-aged man, I wasn’t any more excited by the novel than when I was forced to read it as a teenager.

A plane crashes on a tropical island in the Pacific Ocean. This being wartime, the plane was possibly shot down. One brief mention is made of nuclear war, making this a post-apocalyptic work of science fiction. The only survivors of the crash are perhaps a few dozen boys, aged 6 to roughly 16, British wartime evacuees from who-knows-where heading overseas to some unmentioned safe haven. With the exception of a small group of classmates who sing in a choir together, none of the castaways seem to have any previous acquaintance with each other. Shortly after gathering together into one tribe, a struggle for leadership ensues between two of the older and more charismatic boys, Ralph and Jack. Lines are drawn between these two would-be chiefs, and the longer the boys are removed from civilization, the more they morally devolve into savagery.

Lord of the Flies clocks in at slightly under 200 pages, so it’s a relatively short novel. Even so, the storytelling isn’t exactly lean. A lot of fat could be trimmed in the form of page after page of descriptions of the ocean and the sun, rocks and clouds. One of the story’s repeated points is that rather than perform useful acts for survival like building shelters or keeping a signal fire going, these kids basically just lay around the island goofing off, as children are wont to do. When something interesting comes along, you wonder how long it will take the boys to investigate, but four or five chapters go by and they still haven’t looked into it. Despite the plot’s few memorable punctuations of violence, this doesn’t make for a very compelling narrative. The apathy of the juvenile castaways is contagious. This must be one very forgiving and paradisiacal island indeed if these lazy junior Robinson Crusoes even manage to survive for more than a few chapters.

The boys, of course, are largely symbolic, placed upon this tropical stage to act out man’s inhumanity to man, much like a junior United Nations acting out a mock Cold War in a middle school social studies class. While the survival skills seem highly fictionalized, the human behavior is depicted within the realm of realism. Violence is certainly one way in which such a scenario could be played out. The brutality and callousness with which these boys treat one another calls to mind the Stanford prison experiment of 1971. Once removed from an environment of law and order, the strong begin to revel in their exercise of power over the weak. It is a pessimistic and cynical message, not out of place in the post-apocalyptic genre, but here it’s not quite taken far enough. If that sense of dread and inhumanity is what Golding hopes to convey, his prose is often too ostentatiously poetic to do justice to the book’s violent scenes.

Lord of the Flies certainly isn’t a bad book, but it doesn’t quite seem to merit its inclusion on any century’s-best lists. There are certainly harder hitting novels in both the wilderness survival and post-apocalyptic genres. The fact that the book’s violence and cynicism feel more tepid than extreme, however, may be exactly what makes it safe for high school English courses and ripe for critical acclaim. The dark events depicted never quite escape the lens of English gentility and literary intellectualism through which they are viewed.

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