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…