William Golding

Life and works

William Golding (1911-1993) was born in Cornwall, the son of a schoolmaster. He studied at Oxford, reading Science and then English Literature. At Oxford he published a book of poetry, and after working with small theatre companies, he became an English teacher in Salisbury and got married. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940, serving throughout the rest of the Second World War, and taking part in the historic D-day landings in Normandy, which marked the beginning of the liberation.

The effects of the war on Golding were enormous and contributed to create his pessimistic view of human nature; he recognised that in the past he had been naïve and immature, and that the war had shown him all the horrendous cruelties of which man was capable. He took little comfort in being “on the right side”, for he stated that only the accident of certain social sanctions prevented most people in the Allied countries from acting with a brutality and disregard for humanity similar to that of the Nazis.

After the war Golding returned to teaching and published his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963 and by Peter Hook in 1990. The success of his first book encouraged him to follow it quickly with other similarly original and distinctive novels, The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959) and the widely acclaimed The Spire (1964). There was a pause in Golding’s literary production until 1979 when he published Darkness Invisible (1979), The Rites of Passage (1980), The Paper Men (1984), Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down Below (1989). In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Golding’s concerns

Golding speaks to the private imagination of the reader with immediacy and certainty, and provides an analysis of what is permanent in human nature, looking not at man simply in relation to a particular society but at man in relation to his cosmic situation: his evil nature in Lord of the Flies, his origins in The Inheritors, his destiny in Pincher Martin, his guilt in Free Fall, his vision in The Spire. Golding’s world is remote and dreadful, and he insists on spiritual life; his view of man is essentially religious, full of mystery and darkness.

The structure of his novels

In order to help man not to perish, Golding creates a structure that serves as an emblem of the spiritual life, which becomes a reality only in the realm of imagination. The characteristics of this peculiar structure generally include the development of two narrative movements and two different perspectives of the same situation; radical shifts in point of view, usually appearing near the end of the novel, drive the reader to accept paradox, a spiritual concept, as a condition of existence.

Lord of the Flies

Plot

In Golding’s novel a group of boys aged between six and twelve, evacuated from an unspecified atomic war, land on an Eden-like island in the Pacific or Indian Ocean after a plane crash. There they are confronted with the task of survival. First the boys proceed to set up a rational society based on a ‘grown-up’ model; they establish a government and laws under the leadership of Ralph, Simon and the short-sighted Piggy; shelters are built, plumbing facilities and food supplies are arranged. Yet almost immediately the society disintegrates under two pressures, aggression and superstition. The boys, under the influence of Jack, revert to a savage existence based on hunting and fear of the ‘beast’; after killing an enormous sow, Jack cuts its head off and puts it on a stake transforming it into a kind of god, the Lord of the Flies. Two of the boys from the original tribe are killed, one (Simon) ritually as a totemic beast and the other (Piggy) politically as an enemy. Finally a sacrificial victim (Ralph) is hunted down in order to offer his head to the ‘god’, but the adult world intervenes in the person of a British naval officer. The fable ends with the pathetic image of Ralph crying for “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy”.

Themes and symbolic characters

Lord of the Flies, Golding’s most important novel, is an attempt to attack the liberal optimism of the 20th century and trace the defects of society back to those of human nature.

All the characters exist on two levels: as individuals and as symbols for aspects of human nature.

Ralph, who is fair-haired, handsome, cheerful and mild, stands for reason, democracy and civilisation. He is elected to govern the island and to organise building shelters and a possible rescue. As the organisation increasingly breaks down, since the boys gradually succumb to dirt, laziness and cruelty, he fails as a leader because the situation facing him cannot be solved by a rational approach. In the end, hunted by the others, he turns from leader into victim and recognises the failure and the irrelevance of the kind of human moderation he thought he embodied.

Jack, who represents savagery, violence and instinct, is Ralph’s natural antagonist, and has his own community, his choir of ‘hunters’. He is the aggressive force of evil and imposes a sense of discipline on the others, unlike Ralph. He becomes blood-thirsty and thinks of nothing but killing; in fact the victims of the sacrifices he makes to the ‘beast’ are, at first, pigs, then human beings. He resembles the cruel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness (6.15 in your textbook), who descends into the darkest parts of the forest during his hunts and into the most obscure areas of his self.

Piggy, Ralph’s most loyal supporter, is physically unfit, since he is fat, asthmatic and short-sighted. He is the voice of rationalism; he believes in the possibility of rescue by the adult society, in the values of civilisation, and in the possibility of directing human constructive effort. Normally less articulate than Ralph, in his final scene he urges the boys to “be sensible like Ralph is”, “have rules and agree”, and follow ‘law and rescue’, rather than follow Jack and ‘hunt and kill’. His death represents the triumph of Jack’s irrationality and evil over rationality.

Simon stands for intelligence and sensitivity. He is the only one of the boys who approaches closely enough to understand what they fear: during the ‘confrontation scene’ he actually sees the ‘beast’ and recognises that it is a dead man, a casualty from the war outside and above the island, his corpse tangled in his defective parachute. Running to proclaim his discovery to the others, Simon stumbles into the pig while the others, led by the choir, are enacting the ‘kill the pig’ ritual. In the rush of predatory emotion, identities are confused and the hunters kill Simon, who embodies something of the role of Christ.

Symbolic objects

Even some objects are charged with symbolic meaning: the fire becomes the symbol of destruction, while a white shining conch, used by the children to call on an assembly, stands both for fairness and democracy. The skull of the sow, a victim of the collective ritual killing, is made black by the flies that cover it and becomes both a token of a sacrificial victim and the emblem of the forces of evil.

Structure

The structure of this novel consists of two phases: in the former the story is seen from the childlike point of view of the protagonist, Ralph; in the latter, events are told from the naval officer’s point of view. Golding’s language is a remarkable blend of the abstract, the symbolic and the concrete. On one hand there is the jargon of schoolboys in the fifties, and on the other, when the author voices the children’s thoughts or explains the meaning of their actions, the language is much more elaborate, full of symbols and imagery.