Friday, January 9, 2015

Does Golding offer any solutions for society's ills? Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Golding's novel Lord of the Flies was
written in answer to the Victorian novel The Coral Island, a
narrative of stranded British boys who conquer savages on an island, representing the
superiority of the British as well as a victory of civilization over savagery.  In
Golding's narrative, however, the innate savagery of the boys supersedes the
conditioning of a society and effects chaos and
death. 


When the boys are rescued by the British naval
officer, he is appalled that the boys have not made a better go of their
situation:



"I
should have thought that a pack of British boys--you're all British, aren't you?--would
have been able to put up a better show than that--I mean--....Like the Coral
Island.



However, the irony of
his criticisms that he is a man of wartime, a commander of a warship, a "trim cruiser"
that waits in the distance.  This warship suggests that even the British civilization to
which the boys return is itself fraught with its own brutality and savagery.  Therefore,
it seems that Golding offers no solutions to the intrinsic condition of man; he simply
argues that, as Nathaniel Hawthorne writes in his story "Young Goodman Brown," "Evil is
the nature of mankind."

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