Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
Summary
A group of British schoolboys, evacuated by plane during a war and left stranded after the aircraft crashes, wash up on an uninhabited island with no adults and, at first, real hope of running things sensibly. Ralph finds a conch shell and uses it to call meetings and keep order; he is elected leader on the promise of a signal fire and eventual rescue. William Golding lets that order dissolve with almost no single dramatic turning point, just a slow accumulation of small failures: the fire goes untended, fear of an imagined beast spreads through the group, and Jack, the leader of the choir turned hunters, gains followers by promising to kill whatever the beast actually is. A ship passes within sight of the island and is never signaled, because Jack has pulled every fire watcher away to chase a pig instead.
The beast the boys fear eventually resolves into two things: the corpse of a dead fighter pilot, mistaken in the dark by twins Sam and Eric, and a pig's head that Jack's hunters mount on a stake as an offering, swarmed by flies. Simon, the one boy who seems to understand there is no real monster on the island, only whatever is inside the boys themselves, is mistaken for the beast by the frenzied group at night and beaten to death, Ralph and Piggy among the crowd that kills him. Jack's tribe later steals Piggy's glasses; when Ralph confronts them over it, Roger drops a boulder that kills Piggy outright and shatters the conch along with him. Ralph flees for his life, and Jack's hunters set the island's forest ablaze trying to smoke him out of hiding.
The fire, ironically, finally draws a passing ship. A uniformed British naval officer comes ashore expecting, for one confused moment, to have stumbled onto some kind of game, and only slowly understands from the boys' filthy, painted faces and their sobbing what has actually happened here, his disappointment plain as he turns back toward his own ship. Golding writes the descent as a series of individually reasonable seeming steps rather than one obvious plunge, which is what makes it land, and it suits any reader ready to watch a society built on good intentions come apart in real time.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave William Golding the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature for novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today. Lord of the Flies, published in 1954 after a string of publishers had rejected the manuscript, is the novel that made Golding's name and remains the book most closely tied to his citation.
The award was not uncontroversial inside the Academy itself. Committee member Artur Lundkvist, who had favored other candidates, publicly called Golding a small English phenomenon of no great interest, an unusual breach of the Academy's habit of silence about its own deliberations. The novel has since become one of the most frequently taught and, at various times and places, most frequently challenged books in English, adapted for film in English twice, by Peter Brook in 1963 and Harry Hook in 1990, and again for a BBC television series written by Jack Thorne and directed by Marc Munden. Golding won the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage and was knighted in 1988.