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Essay on Lord of the Flies-2
The very idea of putting Lord of the Flies into a social and historical context seems, at first, absurd. After all, it is a deliberately mythic novel, almost as abstract as it is possible for a work of fiction to be. The setting is never identified. It could be almost any small island in the tropics. The characters, except for Jack have no surnames; many of them, including most of the littluns and choirboys, do not even merit first names. The war that brings them to the island in the first place is mentioned only briefly. An early draft of the novel contained additional chapters outlining the course of the nuclear war that occasions the boys' evacuation, but Golding's editor felt that the novel was stronger without this material, and the chapters in question were cut. Thus stripped of unnecessary detail, the central conflicts come into sharper focus, and the story seems more nearly universal.
Yet Lord of the Flies, like all novels, comes from its author's experiences and interests. It is shaped by Western ideas about civilization and savagery and by the British colonial past. It reacts to the pervasive belief in the superiority of British culture and to the belief that to be British was in some sense the direct opposite of being a savage. It evolves from Christian, perhaps even Calvinist, theories about human nature and sin. It is influenced by debates about biological determinism, by the English school system that both produced and employed Golding, by the adventure stories that boys of Golding's time read, and by the events and aftermath of World War II. The remarkable thing is that, despite being very much a product of its place and time, full of dated schoolboy slang and cold war anxiety, Lord of the Flies remains an influential and powerful commentary on human evil.......
