the lord of the flies thesis

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A Summary and Analysis of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Lord of the Flies was first published in 1954, although it very nearly wasn’t published at all. Its author, William Golding, was a struggling grammar-school teacher when he wrote it, having been given the germ of the idea by his wife, Ann.

The novel’s title is a reference to Beelzebub, a name for the Devil, which means literally ‘lord of the flies’ (at least in most translations ). Given the fact that power, devilry, and, yes, flies are all central aspects of Lord of the Flies , the title is especially apt.

Golding (nicknamed ‘Scruff’ by his pupils) struggled to get the novel accepted by numerous publishers before Faber and Faber took it on. However, even there it was initially rejected (the initial reader at Faber dismissed it as ‘absurd and uninteresting fantasy’ and ‘rubbish and dull’) until a young editor, Charles Monteith, saw potential in the manuscript and got it accepted. It still sells tens of thousands of copies every year.

But how should we interpret this tale of post-apocalyptic barbarism? Before we offer an analysis of Golding’s novel, here’s a brief reminder of the plot.

Lord of the Flies : plot summary

The novel begins with a plane carrying a group of British schoolboys being shot down; the boys land on a desert island. Two of them, Ralph and Piggy, find a conch shell on the beach, and they use it to signal to the rest of the schoolboys, who then start to form their own ‘society’, with a leader elected among them.

Ralph is named the leader while Jack is his sort of second-in-command, in charge of finding food on the island.

After they start a fire to try to signal for help, they accidentally burn down a large part of the nearby forest, killing one boy. When a ship does sail past, it doesn’t stop to rescue the boys because Jack’s band of hunters have carelessly allowed the signal-fire to go out.

Jack and his gang have managed to hunt and kill a pig for them to eat. Things start to get out of hand, and some of the younger boys in particular are terrified that some sea-monster will come and kill them.

When a parachutist – part of a team of fighter-pilots flying overhead – lands on the island, several of the boys think his flapping parachute is the wings of the mysterious island ‘beast’, and they run away, terrified, and spreading fear to the other boys, who organise a hunting trip to try to catch the beast.

Jack and Ralph fall out, with Jack trying to oust the more senior boy from the position of leader – a move that the rest of the boys resist. Jack stomps off with his hunting band, and many of the other boys subsequently desert Ralph’s ‘side’ for Jack.

Jack, emboldened by his new supporters, ritually sacrifices a pig, which is decapitated, its head placed on a stick. Simon sees it, and thinks it’s talking to him: some devil-like figure known as ‘Lord of the Flies’. When Simon returns to the others, they set upon him and kill him, not realising who he is. Jack and his hunters run off with Piggy’s glasses. Jack and Ralph fight, and Piggy is killed with a rock.

Jack and the others hunt Ralph, who flees, only to be rescued by a British sailor who was on board a ship that spotted the fire raging on the island and came ashore. The other boys turn up, and when the officer confronts them over their appearance, they all break down in tears.

Lord of the Flies : analysis

Golding conceived Lord of the Flies as a sort of dark counterpart, or response, to the classic Victorian boys’ adventure novel, The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, in which three boys are marooned on a Pacific island.

But whereas in Ballantyne’s 1857 novel the stranded children encounter evil as an exterior force on the island, Golding inverted this: he shows us, unsettlingly, that evil is always lurking within ourselves, and is only ever just beneath the surface in so-called ‘ordinary’ or ‘civilised’ people.

Golding’s working title for his novel, Strangers from Within , makes it clear that the devil – that ‘Lord of the Flies’ – is within us, all of us, rather than outside, elsewhere.

But although Golding’s novel is often viewed as a dystopian tale about ‘human nature’ and how, in times of desperation and disaster, certain people will seize power and others will be the victims of their oppressive control, Lord of the Flies actually has its roots in something more specific than this: the British class system.

The three principal characters of the novel – Ralph, Piggy, and Jack – represent the three main classes in England, much as the famous class sketch from The Frost Report captured in a sketch just over a decade after Golding’s novel appeared.

As John Sutherland argues in his discussion of Lord of the Flies in How to be Well Read: A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities , Ralph is a grammar-school boy, Piggy the product of a working-class ‘tech’ school (a short-lived post-war phenomenon), and Jack the privileged public school boy.

Ralph, therefore, is riddled with self-doubt about his middling position in English society: the Jacks of the world are above him and the Piggies below him. Jack has all of the confidence of someone born into privilege and with an almost innate sense of their right to lord it over everyone else.

The message of Lord of the Flies , then, is that if you remove these schoolchildren from Britain, the British class system will still reassert itself as they construct their own stratified ‘society’. The island on which the boys are stranded becomes like the island of Great Britain which they left.

Piggy, however, is working-class. As Sutherland argues, his use of phrases like ‘the runs’ instead of, say, ‘an upset tummy’ are subtle ways in which Golding, without hammering home Piggy’s origins, reveal his status to the reader. He was always destined to be the scapegoat because the English class system dictated it. Coupled with his physical or evolutionary disadvantage (his extreme myopia and reliance on glasses) and he was doomed from the start.

The British class system, then, informs the novel, making it a peculiarly British dissection of power structures. According to Sutherland, Golding – himself a teacher at the sort of grammar school which produced the decent and honourable Ralph – once said that he would happily blow up every public school in England, and Lord of the Flies shows how it is the Jack Merridews produced by the English public school system which are the most capable of wreaking destructive power over others.

But it’s also true that Lord of the Flies bears the influence of another important experience in Golding’s life: his experience in the Second World War fighting in the Royal Navy, which showed him first-hand how ordinary men could become capable of performing acts of great evil.

Of course, the horrors of Nazi Germany were also an important source for Golding’s depiction of evil, especially the way the other boys merrily join Jack’s command.

Along with its searing commentary on the inherent evils of the British class system, Lord of the Flies is a powerful narrative about how fear is all it takes to persuade many ‘normal’, ‘decent’ people to behave horrifically.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies”

We “did” this at school. I don’t know why they thought a book about badly-behaved boys would interest a class of girls!

Badly behaved boys always should interest girls

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Lord of the Flies

William golding.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Golding's Lord of the Flies . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Lord of the Flies: Introduction

Lord of the flies: plot summary, lord of the flies: detailed summary & analysis, lord of the flies: themes, lord of the flies: quotes, lord of the flies: characters, lord of the flies: symbols, lord of the flies: literary devices, lord of the flies: theme wheel, brief biography of william golding.

Historical Context of Lord of the Flies

Other books related to lord of the flies.

• Full Title: Lord of the Flies
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1954
• Literary Period: Post-war fiction
• Genre: Allegorical novel / Adventure novel
• Setting: A deserted tropical island in the middle of a nuclear world war
• Climax: Piggy's death
• Point of View: Third person omniscient

Extra Credit for Lord of the Flies

Beelzebub. The phrase "lord of the flies" is a translation of the Greek "Beelzebub," a devil mentioned in the New Testament. In the Bible, Beelzebub sometimes seems to be Satan himself, and at other times seems to be Satan's most powerful lieutenant.

Coral Island. William Golding based several of the main ideas in Lord of the Flies on Coral Island (1858), a somewhat obscure novel by Robert Ballantyne, a 19th-century British novelist. In Coral Island , three English boys create an idyllic society after being shipwrecked on a deserted island. They battle wild hogs, typhoons, hostile island visitors, and eventually Pirates on the South Seas.

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89 Lord of the Flies Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🔝 top-10 lord of the flies research paper topics, 🏆 best lord of the flies essay titles, 📌 creative lord of the flies thesis ideas, 👍 good titles for lord of the flies essay, ❓ lord of the flies: important questions.

• Ralph’s character development in “Lord of the Flies.”
• The main theme in “Lord of the Flies.”
• The success of William Golding’s debut novel.
• “Lord of the Flies”: a discussion of innocence and power.
• The role of the conch in “Lord of the Flies.”
• Civilization vs. savagery in “Lord of the Flies.”
• William Golding’s commentary on human nature and evil.
• The symbolism of fear in “Lord of the Flies.”
• A literary analysis of “Lord of the Flies.”
• “Lord of the Flies”: a summary of events.
• Lord of the Flies, an Allegorical Novel by William Golding As the auction proceeds, the reader follows the heartbreaking events of the book. Boys hunt down a pig and place its head on a stick as an ‘offering’ to the ‘beast’.
• Evil in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding The idea is that we are born with both the capacity of good and the capacity of evil and that the way we are raised, or the environment in which we live determines how we […]
• “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding The reader will wonder that all the boys respond in the same manner to the sound of the blown shell. The author uses aesthetics to drive emotions out of the reader about the value of […]
• Symbolism in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding In The Lord of the Flies, the fire in the story is lit as a symbol of hope and rescue. The island in The Lord Of The Flies resembled the perfect type of Utopia at […]
• Lord of the Flies: Novel Analysis The sinister nature of the novel is inferred in the title which derives from the Hebrew word, Ba’al-zvuv which means god of the fly, host of the fly or literally the Lord of Flies a […]
• Human Nature in “Lord of the Flies” by Golding Considering this, the present paper will analyze the validity of the given statement by drawing on the experiences of characters in Lord of the Flies and evaluating the conditions in which they lived.
• Writing on the Novel I Love: Lord of the Flies In a given Lord of the Flies essay, one needs to illustrate the different themes used by Golding in his novel.
• Literature Studies: “Lord of the Flies” by W. Golding Although Jack Merridew, one of the lead characters of William Golding’s shockingly unforgettable Lord of the Flies novel, is a child and still has a lot to learn in terms of how society works, the […]
• A Comprehensive Analysis of the Key Elements of “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• The Role of Simon in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Literary Comparison of Ballantyne’s “Coral Island” and Golding’s Island in “Lord of the Flies”
• Attitude Towards Children in the Story “Lord of the Flies”
• Jack as a Symbol of Savagery and Anarchy in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• A Description of the Potential for Evil in Everyone as One of the Theme in the Novel “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Evil in Humanity in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Savagery and the Beast Theme in “Lord of the Flies”
• The Fall of Civilization Into Savagery in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• An Allegory of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis Theory in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”
• A Literary Analysis of the Symbolism in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• A Comparison Between the Movie and Novel “Lord of the Flies”
• Abuse of Power and the Effect of Tyrannical Leadership Between “Lord of the Flies” and “The Chrysalids”
• Fear of the Unknown in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• A Comparison of “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding and “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles on Peer Pressure
• Internal and External Conflicts in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Importance of the Extract in the Development of the Main Themes in “Lord of the Flies”
• Destructiveness of Jealousy Depicted in “Lord of the Flies” and “Woman Warrior”
• A Demonstration of the Influence and Power of People Over One Another Through the Character of Piggy in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• A Character of Piggy as the Character Who Most Deserved to Be Saved in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• The Role of Government in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Moral Consequences in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• The Symbolism of Power in “Lord of the Flies”
• An Analysis of Human Behavior in “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Lord of the Flies”
• Changes in the Conception of God in “Lord of the Flies”
• Inate Evil in “To Kill a Mocking Bird” and “Lord of the Flies”
• A Look at Disturbing Events Highlighted in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”
• Allegory of Social Dissolution “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Ralph as a Good Leader in “Lord of the Flies”
• An Analysis of Democratic and Authoritarian Power in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Leaders and Leadership in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Golding’s Pessimistic View on People and Society in His Book “Lord of the Flies”
• Analyzing the Themes of Innocence and Fear in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”
• A Description of the Occurrence of Civilization in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Importance of the Beast in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”: A Dream of a Deserted Island Into Reality
• Adventures, Conflicts, and Struggles in “Lord of the Flies”
• Good and Evil in Human Nature in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
• Failure of Paradise in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”
• Immorality of Human Nature Depicted in Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”
• Formation of Rules and Perception of Civilisation in “Lord of the Flies”
• How Golding Presents the Decline From Civilisation to Savagery in “Lord of the Flies”?
• What Does Piggy Symbolize in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does the Second World War Reflect on “Lord of the Flies”?
• What Ideas About Human Nature and Behavior Golding Was Trying to Express in “Lord of the Flies”?
• What Does the Plane Crash Symbolize in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does William Golding Present the Character of Jack in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does Golding Express His Ideas About Leadership in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does Roger Change in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding?
• How the Society Suppresses Evil in the Novel “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does Golding Create a Setting in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does the Author Present Human Nature in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does William Golding Show Evil at Work in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Anybody Could Regress Into Savagery in Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Is the Author’s Characterisation and Language Attributed to the Novel of the “Lord of the Flies”?
• Why Did William Golding Name His Novel “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does Golding Present Death in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does the Setting Affect the Story “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Children Are Treated in the Story of “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does Golding Make the Physical World Seem Important in “Lord of the Flies”?
• What Is Ralph’s Attitude Toward Piggy in the First Chapter of “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Many Boys Are in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Golding Creates Tension in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does the Opening Prepare the Reader for the Rest of the Novel “Lord of the Flies”?
• Why the Boys Were Doomed to Fail in “Lord of the Flies”?
• What Influenced William Golding to Write “Lord of the Flies”?
• Ways That Golding Presents the Island in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Golding Uses Symbols in “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does William Golding Use the Setting to Develop the Main Theme of His Novel “Lord of the Flies”?
• How Does Piggy’s Character Develop Through Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”?
• What Ruined Ralph and Jack’s Friendship in “Lord of the Flies”?
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IvyPanda . "89 Lord of the Flies Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." December 8, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/lord-of-the-flies-essay-examples/.