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• William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954.

• A group of boys are stranded on a deserted island after their plane crashes. There are no adults and the boys struggle to live in harmony. They end up fighting for control and, ultimately, survival.

• The novel was inspired by Golding’s time in the British Navy during World War Two, and his job as a schoolteacher.

• The novel explores themes of violence, power and human nature.

Did you know?

Golding took some of his ideas for Lord of the Flies from another novel called The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne.

In The Coral Island, the main characters, also called Jack and Ralph, live and work together in harmony. Golding didn’t think this was realistic and wanted to write a more truthful adventure story.

After their plane is shot down, a group of English schoolboys are stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. There are no adults to look after the boys, who range from six to 12 years old.

At first, they work together to survive. They vote that Ralph, one of the older boys, should be ‘chief’ and choose Jack to oversee hunting. They create and follow rules, hold meetings and use a conch shell to show whose turn it is to speak.

They create a signal fire, using a boy called Piggy’s glasses, but it burns out of control. Jack becomes obsessed with hunting the pigs on the island and his group of hunters fail to keep the signal fire going when a ship goes past.

The smaller boys become increasingly frightened by the idea that there is a "beastie" on the island. One night, a dead parachutist gets caught in a tree and the boys think that it is the beast coming to attack them.

Jack and Ralph argue. Jack leaves the group and the hunters follow him. They kill a pig, leaving the head as an offering to the beast.

A quiet boy called Simon has a strange vision where he thinks the pig’s head is talking to him. He faints. When he appears out of the shadows, covered in blood, the boys kill him in a wild frenzy.

Jack’s hunters attack Ralph and his group, smashing the conch, killing Piggy and setting fire to the island. Ralph narrowly misses being killed by the hunters’ spears and runs to the beach where he is surprised by a naval officer.

A passing naval ship had seen the fire on the island and launched a boat to investigate. The officer assumes that the boys have been up to "fun and games". The boys stop fighting and begin to cry. They have been rescued.

Activity

Ralph

Ralph is the protagonist.

He is chosen by the boys to be their leader and tries to create a fair society with clear rules. He is reasonable and decisive.

Ralph is handsome, athletic and one of the oldest, which means the other boys look up to him.

Piggy

Piggy becomes Ralph’s most loyal friend and follower. He wears glasses, suffers from asthma and is overweight. He is clever but most of the other boys can’t see his strengths and don’t respect him.

He has been brought up by his auntie and comes from a lower social class than the other boys.

Jack

Jack is the antagonist.

He is strong-willed, cruel and proud. He is used to being in charge as he is the Head Boy of his school and leads the boys’ choir.

Jack wants power and becomes obsessed with hunting and violence.

Simon

Simon is a shy boy and often spends time alone. He has fainting fits and experiences hallucinations.

Simon stands up for others and bravely tries to find out more about the mysterious beast. He is the only one who understands that the beast is not real.

Activity

Themes are the main ideas that appear repeatedly in a novel. Some of the important themes in Lord of the Flies are:

• Violence
• Power
• Human nature

Away from civilisation and free from rules, the boys quickly begin to turn to violence and cruelty.

Under Jack’s leadership, they hunt and kill pigs. By the end of the novel, they are hunting and killing each other. They chant:

Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!

The characters who resist violence, like Simon, Piggy and Ralph, become victims. It is only when the adults return that the violence stops.

In Lord of the Flies, Golding explores the idea that basic human nature is violent and selfish. He questions whether human beings would still behave in a civilised way without rules. For example:

• Early in the novel, the boys play when they should be working and choose which rules to obey. As the novel continues, they give in to their fear of an imaginary monster, lose their self-control and increasingly turn to violence.

• Before he is killed, Simon begins to understand that all humans have the potential to be violent. He hears the pig’s head, which the boys think is evil, say to him: "You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?"

• The novel ends with Ralph realising humankind’s potential for violence too. When he sees the naval officer, Ralph weeps "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart."

The novel centres around the power struggle between Ralph and Jack. They have different leadership styles:

• Ralph represents the kind of power that comes from a democracy when people vote freely to choose their leaders and rules.

• Jack represents the kind of power that comes from dictatorship when one person takes complete power and keeps that power through fear and violence.

Piggy clearly identifies the choice the boys need to make:

Which is better—to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?

Writers choose words and phrases carefully when they write. Readers can look closely at texts to think about how and why the writer made these choices.

Symbolism

In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses symbols to suggest deeper ideas to the reader. Symbols stand for something else beyond their literal meaning.

Structure refers to how written text is organised – the way the story is ordered and shaped.

The ending

The novel ends with the boys hunting Ralph as the island burns. It is only the unexpected arrival of the naval officer that saves him.

Golding uses a series of contrasts to highlight the differences between the beginning and the ending of the novel. For example, at the start the island is "dazzling" and the lagoon is filled with "glittering" fish. At the end, it is a "burning wreckage", covered in "black smoke".

Golding also uses contrasts to show how the boys become more uncivilised and violent throughout the novel. For example, with Ralph:

Activity

The context in which a novel was written can sometimes tell you more about its themes, message and meaning.

World War Two

Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, less than 10 years after the end of World War Two. At the end of World War Two, atom bombs were dropped for the first time by the Americans on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout the 1950s, when Golding was writing, people were terrified that another war would mean the whole world being destroyed by nuclear bombs.

This fear is reflected in Lord of the Flies as the fictional world is at war, which explains why the boys’ plane was shot down. Piggy even thinks an atomic bomb has gone off and they won’t be rescued at all.

You can learn more about what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this Bitesize History guide on World War Two.

William Golding

Golding served in the British Navy during the Second World War (1939-1945) and believed that wars were more about human nature than politics.

He also worked as a schoolteacher before and after his navy career, and noticed how cruel children could be to each other.

He brought these ideas together in Lord of the Flies to show how quickly human beings can turn to violence.