It seems to me that Golding's target is so broad that it
extends beyond any specific society. Instead, Golding's point is that all humans are
instinctually driven by a savage force (Freud termed this the "Id") which is essentially
supressed because of rules imposed by society. When removed from a structured society,
Golding argues through his story of the boys on the island, humans resort to this
instinctually savage behavior.
In a statement Golding
issued to the American publishers of Lord of the Flies, Golding
said:
The
theme [of Lord of the Flies] is an attempt to trace the defects of
society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society
must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system
however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except
the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality
enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The
officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in
a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who
will rescue the adult and his
cruiser?
It is evident, from
this statement, that the "defects of human nature" that Golding describes are present
within all humans, regardless of the rules of the society in which they live.
Fittingly, Golding does not offer any solutions for this problem; instead, he uses
children (because they are generally accepted to be "innocent" and have not yet been
corrupted by society in the same way that adults have been) to show that everyone is
susceptible to the descent into savagery because it is inherently present within all of
us. (He gives evidence of this in Chapter 7 when Ralph, who is the most logical,
order-desiring, savagery-resisting child on the island, gets caught up in the excitement
of a hunt.)
No comments:
Post a Comment