Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies
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William Golding on Lord of the Flies
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The war that answered BallantyneGolding spent five years in the Royal Navy, commanding a rocket-launching craft at D-Day and joining the pursuit of the Bismarck. What he witnessed in those years wasn’t exceptional cruelty from exceptional people. It was ordinary men doing what ordinary men turned out to be capable of, and that observation became the engine of the novel.
I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
Postwar Britain drew comfort from the idea that Nazi Germany had been a foreign aberration, something alien to the decent, victorious Allies. Golding had seen enough to reject that consolation entirely, and he wrote the book as a direct rebuttal of it.
My book was to say: you think that the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.
That rebuttal also had a specific literary target. R.M. Ballantyne’s 1857 novel ‘The Coral Island’ told the story of British schoolboys stranded on a desert island who manage admirably. Golding found the premise sentimental. He deliberately kept Ballantyne’s character names, Ralph and Jack, putting the two novels in direct comparison. His essay ‘Fable’ names what the war had given him that Ballantyne lacked.
after the war [...] I had discovered what one man could do to another
How he wrote it
Notebooks, rejection, and the controlled fableHe wrote the manuscript during spare periods at the all-boys grammar school in Salisbury where he had returned to teach after the Navy. Pages accumulated between lessons. The finished manuscript was then rejected more than twenty times before an editor named Charles Monteith pulled it from a rejection pile at Faber, where a reader had described it as ‘absurd and uninteresting... rubbish and dull.’ Golding’s own retrospective view was almost as harsh. John Carey’s biography records the range of his private dismissals.
[On Lord of the Flies, as reported by biographer John Carey:] the book was “boring and crude,” the language “O-level stuff,” the classic status “a joke,” the income from it “Monopoly money.”
His private journal, also reported by Carey, suggests those dismissals weren’t simply modesty. They pointed toward something more corrosive: a fear that scrutiny of the work would become scrutiny of the man behind it.
basically I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled
He eventually refused to reread the manuscript, afraid he would confirm his worst suspicions about it. The self-contempt and the book’s canonical status coexisted for the rest of his life.
What the novel’s construction does preserve of his intentions is the word he chose for its form. He called it a fable, and built it accordingly. Characters carry ideas rather than fully autonomous inner lives: Ralph holds to democratic order, Piggy insists on reason, Jack embodies the drive for power through fear, Simon has a quality closer to vision. The island is a controlled environment designed to answer a question, not to document childhood. He was clear, in interviews, about what kind of writer was doing that work.
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a storyteller.
The personal thread
History felt as heavy as a brickThe D-Day crossing gave Golding a physical experience of history that shaped how he later described the novel’s stakes. Writing in his 1961 essay ‘The English Channel,’ collected in ‘The Hot Gates,’ he recalled a single night during that crossing when navigation failed and he drove through mine-laden water in darkness. The passage catches what he meant when he called the war the great formative influence of his life.
I found that we were miles west of our position. So we turned southeast and steamed at full speed all night over jet black waves that were showered with sparks of phosphorescence and possibly loaded with mines. I stood there all night catching up and felt history in my hands as hard and heavy as a brick.
He didn’t position himself outside the novel’s argument. He described himself and his fellow servicemen before the war as ‘Ralphs’ and ‘Piggys,’ decent people who believed in order. That self-identification made the war’s lesson personal: the same ignorance the novel diagnoses in its characters was the ignorance he had once shared.
I think man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature.
What he wants us to sit with
The beast was never on the islandHe stated the novel’s central argument in interviews with a precision that cuts against any reading of the book as a story about bad children. The argument reaches past psychology into political philosophy: no system of governance can outrun the nature of the people inside it.
an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.
After Golding’s death, his daughter Judy Golding Carver wrote to ‘The Guardian’ to correct a reading that had reduced the novel to a claim that boys are naturally devilish. Her letter reported what Golding had said in an interview, and it shifts the emphasis from appetite to accountability. He had made Jack attractive deliberately: the point was not that certain people are innately monstrous, but that all people carry what he called ‘the terrible disease of being human.’
[Reported by his daughter Judy Golding Carver as what Golding said in an interview:] the novel “was about the importance of the rule of law. It was also about the complexity of human beings.”
The naval officer who arrives at the novel’s end to rescue the boys glances back at his warship on the horizon. Golding closes on that image without irony: the adult world the boys are being returned to is already organizing itself toward the same catastrophe they have just enacted at smaller scale.