Lord of the Flies Essay

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Lord of the Flies Essay Sample

Lord of the Flies has 'a pretty big connexion' with Ballantyne. In The Coral Island Ralph, Jack and Peterkin are cast away on a desert island, where they live active, civilized, and civilizing lives. Practical difficulties are easily surmounted; they light fires with bowstrings and spyglasses, hunt pigs for food, and kill them with much ease and a total absence of guilt--indeed of bloodshed. They are all Britons--a term they use to compliment each other --all brave, obedient and honourable. There is much useful information conveyed concerning tropical islands, including fieldworkers' reporting of the conduct of cannibals: but anthropology is something nasty that clears up on the arrival of a missionary, and Jack himself prevents an act of cannibalism by telling the flatnoses not to be such blockheads and presenting them with six newly slaughtered pigs. The parallel between the island and the Earthly Paradise causes a trace of literary sophistication: 'Meat and drink on the same tree! My dear boys, we're set up for life; it must be the ancient paradise--hurrah! . . . We afterwards found, however, that these lovely islands were very unlike Paradise in many things.' But these 'things' are non-Christian natives and, later, pirates; the boys themselves are cleanly (cold baths recommended) and godly--regenerate, empire-building boys, who know by instinct how to turn paradise into a British protectorate.

The Coral Island could be used as a document in the history of ideas; it belongs inseparably to the period when boys were sent out of Arnoldian schools certified free of Original Sin. Golding takes Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (altering this name to Simon, 'called Peter') and studies them against an altered moral landscape. He is a schoolmaster, and knows boys well enough to make their collapse into savagery plausible, to see them as the cannibals; the authority of the grown-ups is all there is to prevent savagery. If you dropped these boys into an Earthly Paradise 'they would not behave like God-fearing English gentlemen' but 'as like as not . . . find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated. . . The devil would rise out of the intellectual complications of the three white men.' Golding leaves the noble savages out of Lord of the Flies but this remark is worth quoting because it states the intellectual position in its basic simplicity. It is the civilized who are corrupt, out of phase with natural rhythm.