William Golding was born on
September 19, 1911, in Cornwall, England.
Although he tried to write a novel as early as age twelve, his parents urged
him to study the natural sciences. Golding followed his parents’
wishes until his second year at Oxford, when he changed his focus
to English literature. After graduating from Oxford, he worked briefly
as a theater actor and director, wrote poetry, and then became a
schoolteacher. In 1940, a year after England
entered World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy, where he served
in command of a rocket-launcher and participated in the invasion
of Normandy.
Golding’s experience in World War II had a profound effect
on his view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable. After
the war, Golding resumed teaching and started to write novels. His
first and greatest success came with Lord of the Flies (1954),
which ultimately became a bestseller in both Britain and the United
States after more than twenty publishers rejected it. The novel’s
sales enabled Golding to retire from teaching and devote himself
fully to writing. Golding wrote several more novels, notably Pincher
Martin (1956), and a play, The
Brass Butterfly (1958). Although
he never matched the popular and critical success he enjoyed with Lord
of the Flies, he remained a respected and distinguished
author for the rest of his life and was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1983. Golding died in 1993,
one of the most acclaimed writers of the second half of the twentieth
century.
Lord of the Flies tells the story of
a group of English schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after
their plane is shot down during a war. Though the novel is fictional,
its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based
on Golding’s experience with the real-life violence and brutality
of World War II. Free from the rules and structures of civilization
and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend
into savagery. As the boys splinter into factions, some behave peacefully
and work together to maintain order and achieve common goals, while
others rebel and seek only anarchy and violence. In his portrayal
of the small world of the island, Golding paints a broader portrait
of the fundamental human struggle between the civilizing instinct—the
impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and act lawfully—and the
savage instinct—the impulse to seek brute power over others, act
selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence.
Golding employs a relatively straightforward writing style
in Lord of the Flies, one that avoids highly poetic
language, lengthy description, and philosophical interludes. Much
of the novel is allegorical, meaning that the characters and objects
in the novel are infused with symbolic significance that conveys
the novel’s central themes and ideas. In portraying the various
ways in which the boys on the island adapt to their new surroundings
and react to their new freedom, Golding explores the broad spectrum
of ways in which humans respond to stress, change, and tension.
Readers and critics have interpreted Lord of the
Flies in widely varying ways over the years since its publication.
During the 1950s and 1960s,
many readings of the novel claimed that Lord of the Flies dramatizes
the history of civilization. Some believed that the novel explores
fundamental religious issues, such as original sin and the nature
of good and evil. Others approached Lord of the Flies through
the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who taught that
the human mind was the site of a constant battle among different
impulses—the id (instinctual needs and desires), the ego (the conscious,
rational mind), and the superego (the sense of conscience and morality).
Still others maintained that Golding wrote the novel as a criticism
of the political and social institutions of the West. Ultimately,
there is some validity to each of these different readings and interpretations
of Lord of the Flies. Although Golding’s story is
confined to the microcosm of a group of boys, it resounds with implications
far beyond the bounds of the small island and explores problems
and questions universal to the human experience.
