I need help with Lord of the Flies.

Submitted by Ultinia t3_zxz29e in books

I finished reading the book and I feel like I missed something.

It was a super hard read, and I was waiting for it to be over the whole time. But, it wasn't meant to be entertaining, right? It tries to tell you something about society and gives a semi-realistic shipwreck story. In my opinion, it did neither.

First, the realism (this ties into my thoughts on the themes in the book). As the book reached its climax, I found myself sincerely doubting that the writer of the book had ever met a pre-teen, let alone been one. It bothered me how much he was fixated on bloodlust and murder. In a realistic story, the children would not be murdering each other, but dying of starvation or thirst, or exposure.

But the book wasn't really about realism either, so I could have let that slide too if the theme of the story wasn't also completely wrong. William Golding suggests that without society, human nature causes us to be callous and bloodthirsty, and centering society around solving these problems is what causes problems in said society (this is one of the things I may have gotten wrong).

I completely disagree with this theme. Humans are not pre-diposed to hate everyone who isn't part of their in-group, and saying that all humans are fundamentally bloodthirsty for the people they hate is a very weak generalization.

So either I completely misunderstood the theme, in which case I need it explained to me, or I disagree with the theme and I just don't understand enough about the world (or maybe a mix of both!).

Either way, I need help. Thanks in advance!

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equal_inequity t1_j231mbl wrote

You're missing that the boys do attempt to organise and create some sort of social order. The point is not that without imposed rules and structure humans are inherently wholly inclined to savagery but rather that humans have natural impulses towards BOTH civilisation AND savagery, and that these impulses necessarily exist in conflict with one another.

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Ultinia OP t1_j2ccez7 wrote

Okay, that helps. Thank you. Does this mean he is suggesting that in "normal "society our impulses towards civilization win out because of the environment, and placing humans in a different environment (like the one in the book) will weaken our impulse towards civilization and strengthen our impulses towards savagery?

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EwokPiss t1_j231gyk wrote

You should interpret the book as you like.

However, I would point out a few things that I thought about while and after reading. Primates of all sorts regularly kill each other. They aren't necessarily bloodthirsty, but seem to do so to ensure their tribes survival. Resources are probably the main reason why humans go to war. There is a finite amount of them which means everyone cannot have everything. I don't think that aspect (resource scarcity) was well represented, but it's pretty clear that war occurs regularly and that we kill each other in brutal ways.

Lord of the Flies is regularly criticized for its unrealistic depiction and I think it's a good criticism overall, but I don't particularly agree with the idea that humans aren't warlike naturally. It seems clear that we historically are for a variety of reasons and only recently, with society reaching our modern sophistication, that wars are more rare (which isn't meant to imply that this time is better).

Just my thoughts.

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AbbyM1968 t1_j27vjc3 wrote

One thing I read about lotf was the plane that dropped them off ejected them because it was called to go fight in a war. I had to check whether that was true: it was. The boys weren't on the island very long, I don't think; couple of weeks, maybe? They were a boy's school class returning from something when they were ejected to the island. At the end of the book, when they were retrieved, the captain remarked he expected better of ____ boy's; that they'd be able to organize society. One of the leading boys said, "It started out that way ..."

But, I think it was about how close savagery is to the surface. And how little it takes to bring it out. (Sorry: dim, 35 y.o. memories)

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Ultinia OP t1_j2cd8tu wrote

The problem with resources is that they really were quite abundant in the book. As for humans being warlike naturally, now that I think about it (and maybe look a little at history) I guess we actually are very prone to war. But in the book, what was the reason for this war? Was Jack the only instigator, simply wanting power for himself? Did the other boys just follow him because he satisfied their needs better?

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EwokPiss t1_j2cev9j wrote

I think you're thinking about this too logically. It's true that people often think logically, but a lot of people, especially young boys, don't. It isn't what the antagonist provided, but how he made them feel. He satisfied their need to feel a certain way. Plus he did provide the first pig (if memory serves) and he had previous rapport (I think he was one of the choir boys).

Civilization was on the edge and he pushed it over.

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sometimeszeppo t1_j2378f9 wrote

I didn't think he was going for "realism", although he did write it in response to a children's adventure story called The Coral Island. You're not wrong at all to disagree with the themes running through the book if that's your take away from it, but I didn't see anywhere that Golding was saying that human nature was inherently callous and bloodthirsty without organised society, I thought he was just saying that those feelings are inside us. In a way they hardly do better than the adult "civilised" society, where there's apparently a big war going on (Golding served in WWII, which really disillusioned him as to his belief of the goodness in humanity).

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Ultinia OP t1_j2ccudr wrote

So these feelings are inside of us, and they will surface given the right circumstance, for instance, in a war filled with much death.

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wongie t1_j23lmvq wrote

Some background would probably help a bit in interpreting LotF. There was a book called The Coral island.

written in 1857. The book follows the same premise, kids get ship wrecked and is told from the PoV of a character you may recognise as Ralph. They have an opposite experience to the kids from LotF; food is everywhere, they mange to fight off native Polynesian cannibals, help in some missionary work converting people to Christianity and generally bring order and have a easy time of it. This book was taught in British primary schools, the American equivalent to elementary school; it instilled in kids of the Empire the notion of what it meant to be of the superior western race, of being born in the land of hope and glory, and the kind of imperial order inherent in them that they should aspire to.

Golding, in actuality was a school teacher, so contrary to your belief that he never met pre-teens, he most certainly did and had very up close and personal experiences with them. These experience of what kids did is very different to the ideal, model imperial child that the Coral Island was suppose to be inspiring. The behaviour he saw in schools was also something that was intrinsic to the British social system. Class in Britain is something that in my experience people from outside Britain have a hard time grasping in how much it influences our lives here, it's not just a simple income classification, the social class you are born into essentially will dictate your life. Even as late as 2002, Britain still had one of the worst class divides in education within the industrialised world.

This is why the oft brought-up article about some kids in Tonga getting stranded isn't actually as relevant as many think it is considering the Tongan education system at the time of the incident wasn't steeped in the centuries old rigid social hierarchy of imperial and post-war Britain and all the kids in that incident were already friends of the same in-group and social class. Why does this matter? The grammar schools that Golding was teaching at weren't filled with working class children and had shared experiences of poverty; rather they were filled with entitled, petulant middle class kids.

In short, Lord of the Flies was a primarily a rebuttal to the Coral Island which was saying the superior western stock just inherently instils grand imperial order wherever they go; Golding was refuting that claim that kids when left to their own devices would just do what entitled kids do and run amok, start some fights as they wrestle between them to actualize, and very poorly at that, the imperial order they were taught and raised to believe in and, more than just being a commentary on the Conrad-esque darkness in humanity, that kids brought up in strict social hierarchies and upbringings would, again left to their own, go and start their own class wars amongst each other.

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Ultinia OP t1_j2cdid8 wrote

Didn't know about Coral Island, but it sounds like an even worse depiction. Compared to that, Golding did an okay job, but both books seem to be pretty extreme in their depiction. I guess Golding did that on purpose to really drive home how poorly "civilized" children would do on an island. Also didn't know about the huge class struggle going on in Britain.

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Marcuse0 t1_j239dxm wrote

I think it's a mistake to say that the story isn't realistic therefore it can't happen and therefore the story is somehow "wrong". It's not a documentary. The strength of stories is that they can depict anything happening, however unlikely, in that set of circumstances. I'm sure that in a lot of situations people would react differently, but the story there is supposed to be a tragedy about how people will resort to "savage" methods to survive when they're removed from their context and the controlling minds that keep them operating in the manner society wants them to.

It's totally legitimate to believe that LotF is inaccurate to how things are in real life, and disagree with the point the book is making, while appreciating the book as a piece of literature which has some value nevertheless. It's not misunderstanding anything to hear the message and have that not work for you.

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Viclmol81 t1_j23bbus wrote

It is an allegory for society. Structure and hierarchy. Rules and rebellions. All kinds of psychological and sociological representations of human nature.

I read this book at school (and again as an adult) and was captivated by the profound meaning in it.

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rudebish t1_j24g6jk wrote

this right here is what I gleaned from reading this awesome book in high school.....that social structure/hierarchy is a construct that is not necessarily "bad"; it's what helps to separate us from the animals but once those structures are gone, it allows the darker instincts of human nature to rise and possibly take over.

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tky_phoenix t1_j23jf8f wrote

I remember hearing about it in an NPR podcast that the only similar incident of kids stranding on an island turned out completely different. They didn’t kill each other at all but actually organized and cooperated. Very different from the book.

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dripping_dream t1_j244uj3 wrote

Damn I thought LOTF was hella entertaining…

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Jack-Campin t1_j23kjqt wrote

It's an ideological dystopian fantasy, written in a period when everybody was doing it: Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence, Compton Mackenzie in The Lunatic Republic, Bernard Wolfe in Limbo '90, George Orwell in 1984 - these were all written within ten years. (Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes were a bit later).

It would have been obvious to anyone reading it that (a) it was a parable for a particular social theory and (b) that social theories were simply another kind of fiction. The world had just been through the rise and fall of fascism, and that was just a fairytale gone horribly wrong. People didn't look to these dystopian stories for any kind of profound and life-changing message.

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bgb372 t1_j23n06l wrote

Don’t worry about it. I feel the same way about Catcher in the rye. I don’t get it or the hype. Get another book and keep going. You don’t have to enjoy or get every book you read. There will be clunkers.

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BasedArzy t1_j27g5sx wrote

Context helps. The author was a hardline conservative and it was written in the aftermath of WW2. A whole lot of Lord of the Flies is explained by the sort of person who serves in WW2 against the Nazis but considers themselves “of that sort of nature”, votes Tory, and attended a public school.

Lord of the Flies took all the same tired old boring mess of Hume and “The man in nature” and melded it with the abusive legacy of English schoolboys.

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arcangel092 t1_j23pwfx wrote

I felt similar to you. The story certainly isn’t based on any form of realism and is meant to be representative of certain themes in humanity. That being said the amount of simple communication issues was off putting to me, and there was a severe lack of empathy throughout the story which is deeply human. It did hone in on the dangers of ego and power, but to me fell flat in its attempt to make that point. Overall I think the book is quite overrated. I don’t hold it to be a classic or even much more than a story for kids, and I am hesitant to find much utility in it even for children.

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