CCEA GCSE English Literature

William Golding published Lord of the Flies in 1954. It follows a group of British schoolboys, stranded on an uninhabited tropical island after a plane crash, who try to govern themselves and slide into savagery. The novel is written in the third person, mostly through Ralph's point of view, and it moves from an optimistic opening to a bleak and violent middle before a sudden rescue.

Setting and context

The boys have been evacuated from Britain during a war that is never fully explained, though an atomic conflict is suggested. The plane carrying them is shot down, the adults on board are killed and the boys land on a coral island with fruit, a lagoon and a mountain. Golding had served in the Royal Navy in the Second World War and had seen how ordinary people could commit atrocities, which shaped his view that evil comes from within human beings and not from outside society. He also wrote against R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story The Coral Island (1857), in which British boys on a Pacific island behave sensibly and bravely; Golding's boys do not.

The island works as a small model of the adult world: the boys' meetings, rules and conflicts echo politics, and the war that brought them there goes on in the background.

Plot

Ralph, a fair-haired boy of about twelve, and a fat, short-sighted, asthmatic boy who is nicknamed Piggy meet on the beach. Piggy's glasses and his ideas are important from the start. They find a conch shell, which Ralph blows to gather the other survivors. At the first assembly the boys elect Ralph chief, and Jack Merridew, who leads a group of choirboys, is disappointed; Ralph gives him charge of the choir, who become the hunters.

Ralph, Jack and Simon explore the island and decide it is an island. The boys agree rules: whoever holds the conch has the right to speak, and a signal fire must be kept burning on the mountain in case a ship passes. The first fire gets out of control and burns part of the forest, and a small boy with a birthmark on his face is not seen again, which is the first death.

As the weeks pass, the boys quarrel over work. Jack's hunters want meat and the thrill of killing pigs, and the fire goes out while they are away; a ship passes and does not see them. Ralph is furious, and Jack is humiliated when Piggy criticises him. Younger boys, the littluns, begin to say that there is a beast. Sam and Eric, the twins, report seeing a monster on the mountain. It is in fact the body of a dead parachutist, which the wind moves.

Jack calls a meeting, challenges Ralph's leadership, loses the vote and leaves with some of the choir. Simon, a quiet boy who spends time alone in the forest, finds a pig's head that Jack's hunters have left on a stick as an offering to the beast. He has a hallucinatory conversation with it, and the head, now called the Lord of the Flies, tells him that the beast is part of the boys themselves. Simon climbs the mountain, finds that the beast is the dead airman and goes down to tell the others. In the dark, the boys are dancing and chanting at a feast on the beach; they take Simon for the beast and kill him.

Jack's tribe steals Piggy's glasses to make fire. Ralph, Piggy, Sam and Eric go to Castle Rock to ask for them back. Jack ties up Sam and Eric, and Roger, standing above, releases a boulder that kills Piggy and shatters the conch. Ralph escapes and is hunted by the tribe, who set the forest alight to smoke him out. He runs to the beach, falls at the feet of a naval officer who has been drawn by the fire, and the boys are rescued. Ralph weeps for the end of innocence and for Piggy.

Characters

Ralph

Ralph represents order, democracy and the hope of rescue. He is chosen leader partly because of his appearance and the conch, and he is practical but not always clever; he relies on Piggy to think. He is capable of being drawn into the hunting excitement, and he takes part in Simon's killing, which gives his final tears more weight.

Jack

Jack is the leader of the choir and the main threat to Ralph. He begins by wanting to hunt, and he becomes a tyrant who uses fear of the beast to control the others. His face paint lets him hide behind a mask, which frees him from shame. He stands for the appeal of power, violence and tribal loyalty.

Piggy

Piggy is the intellectual, with glasses that make fire, and he is the voice of reason and rules. The others mock him for his weight, asthma and class accent. His death marks the destruction of rational thought on the island.

Simon

Simon is gentle, insightful and solitary. He feeds the littluns and understands that the beast is inside the boys. Many readers see him as a Christ-like figure, and his death, as he comes with the truth, is the most shocking moment in the book.

Roger

Roger is a quiet, cruel boy who, as the novel goes on, loses the restraint that civilisation placed on him. Early on he throws stones at a littlun, deliberately aiming to miss, because the habit of restraint still holds him; he later becomes Jack's enforcer and kills Piggy.

Sam and Eric, and the littluns

Sam and Eric are loyal to Ralph until they are forced to join Jack's tribe. The littluns show how frightened and unprotected the youngest are when adult authority disappears.

Themes

Civilisation and savagery

The central conflict is between the rules and order Ralph tries to keep and the instinct for power and violence in Jack. Golding shows that civilisation is fragile: the boys' British upbringing does not stop them from killing.

The darkness inside human beings

The beast starts as a creature on the mountain and becomes a symbol of the evil the boys carry in themselves. Simon's conversation with the pig's head states this idea directly.

Leadership and power

Ralph leads by consent and rules, while Jack leads by fear, spectacle and reward. The novel asks what makes people follow a leader, and shows how easily a crowd can be manipulated.

Loss of innocence

The boys begin as playful children and end as killers. The naval officer's arrival shows the adult world as another version of the savagery on the island, since he is himself part of a war.

Symbols

The conch stands for democracy, order and the right to speak; as the tribe gains strength it loses influence, and it breaks when Piggy dies. Piggy's glasses stand for science, intellect and the power to make fire, and Jack's theft of them marks a turning point. The signal fire is the hope of rescue, and its later uses, for cooking and then for hunting Ralph, show that the boys' priorities have changed. The pig's head on a stick, the Lord of the Flies, is the evil within the boys; the title is a translation of Beelzebub, a name for the devil. Face paint allows Jack's tribe to lose their sense of self and act without guilt.

Methods

Golding uses a third-person narrator who stays close to the boys' thoughts, so we feel their fear and excitement. Setting is used with care: the island begins as a paradise and is gradually spoiled, with burned land, rot and darkness, and weather such as the storm on the night of Simon's death shares the mood of the scene. The novel is structured as a descent, with chapters that mark steps downward: the loss of the fire, the hunt, the murder of Simon and the murder of Piggy. Violence is shown in language that links hunting to ritual, with a chant that turns the boys into a mob. Irony is strong at the end, since the officer rebukes the boys for not behaving better, while he is himself engaged in a war.

Key moments to know

• The first assembly, when the conch is blown and Ralph is elected.
• The first fire that spreads and the disappearance of the boy with the birthmark.
• The ship that passes while the fire is out.
• Simon's encounter with the Lord of the Flies and his death.
• The theft of Piggy's glasses.
• The death of Piggy and the breaking of the conch.
• The hunt for Ralph and the arrival of the naval officer.