Healthy Society

During the Second World War William Golding saw the terrible truth of life: every human has a vice. This understanding became the basis for his first novel, The Lord of the Flies.

The novel is set on a desert island, where a plane with children has crashed evacuating them from the hot spot. The main characters are Jack and Ralph. Both are leaders by nature, but completely different. Jack is calculating, cold, and tough. Ralph is softer and more vulnerable. Once on the island without adults, children are trying to create their own society without senior officers and their stupid rules and instructions.

Ralph becomes the leader, which irritates Jack who wouldn’t mind taking his place. Jack creates his own team of children who are tired of eating fruits and making sure the signal fire is not out. Jack becomes ruthless hunter. He and his team kill wild pigs living on the island. The boys do not spare even those animals that have little piglets. The hunger stops being the main motive for the murder. Jack and his friends are led by bloodlust and inexorable cruelty.

Jack’s cruelty comes to the point that he kills the boys who do not belong to a gang of hunters. Brutal children begin to destroy everything that surrounds them. Ralph stays alone, as all of his friends were killed. Yet he did not lose hope. Fortunately, sailors noticed the island and rescued the children.

The main theme of the novel is civilization versus savagery, an attempt to analyze the shortcomings of the society and the defects of human nature. The moral of this novel is that the form of society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual, and not on the political regime, no matter how logical and reasonable it may seem. William Golding shows the reader that the expansion of civilized limits does not lead to the creation of a new, more harmonious and healthy society, on the contrary, society degrades and destroys itself.

In the course of the novel the author shows how different people experience the influences of the instincts of savagery and civilization to various degrees. Piggy, for example, doesn’t have any savagery instincts, while Roger hardly comprehends the rules of civilization.

Another theme in the novel is loss of innocence. All the children on the island go through the process of transformation from being well-behaved and organized to being bloodthirsty and cruel. They lose the desire to return to civilization and the sense of innocence. Golding says that civilization can mitigate but never can destroy the evil that exists in people.