Themes and Morals of Lord of the Flies

THEME AND MORALS OF THE LORD OF THE FLIES

The theme of The Lord Of The Flies is its description of nature of man. According to William Golding himself, “The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.” The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not any political system however apparently logical or respectable.

The novel runs directly contrary to the Rousseauvian belief that naturally good man is the innocent and helpless victim of social forces over which he has no control. “The world is the way it is, because the people in it are the way they are”, says Golding. Golding is in the minority as a large majority if modern writers and thinkers cling to the Rousseauvian ideal of ‘noble savage’ or committed to the position that man is victimised from birth by society which is the real culprit.

Golding’s position is a very old one. It goes back to atleast as far as the Old Testament. In the first book, the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve are presented as having brought their own downfall upon themselves through disobedience. This disobedience has been called the ‘Original Sin’ and theologians have long taught that all of mankind is sinful and wicked because Adam and Eve were sinful. From this point of view man is born into the world in a state of Original Sin, a fault directly traceable to his own human nature and not to society.

It is clear from the novel that Golding shares a common conviction with those who believe in the fall of man. This does not mean that Golding shares a religious point of view with Christianity. There is merely a coincidence of ideas in The Lord Of The Flies.

  Theme of Innocence and Experience

 Critics compare the innocence of the boys to the innocence of Adam and Eve. The experience gained by the boys can be compared to the experience gained by Adam and Eve. Golding’s island in the novel is full of imperfect things and is in a way better compared to the perfect things of the Garden of Eden.

In the beginning of the novel, Jack and Ralph start a childish quarrel, but it reaches a point when they break from each other and realise that it is no longer innocent quarrel that they’re having, but ‘fighting in reality’.

The killing of Piggy makes them realise that they were serious about their misunderstanding. The killing of the sow is compared to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The sow killing in the novel is shown as soon as Jack and Ralph break from each other. Soon after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, Adam knew Eve, and Eve conceived Cain. This has direct reference to the sow killing. Adam and Eve, by disobeying God, got an experience (sexual) and the boys also gain some experience after the killing of the sow – childhood sexuality. The Feelings that Oedipus had on the day he married his mother can be compared to the feelings of the boys in the novel.

In Hebrew, Beelzebub means, The Lord of Insects. This refers to the sow – title of the novel, The Lord Of The Flies. The sow symbolises the rotten state of affairs in the island. It may be said that, since Ralph and his friends were not with Jack at the killing of the sow, Ralph and his friends were relatively innocent

Theme of Fear

William Golding achieves a great unity of purpose through his use of fear in the novel The Lord of The Flies. Fear is perhaps the most convincing single emotion he has chosen, for everyone has fears and every adult can remember certain childhood fears. The universality of these emotions provide its prime power. Golding’s master stroke is to present fear as the motive behind the actions of the boys. Ralph foolishly climbs the mountain at night in search of the beast, because he fears that he may be accused of cowardice. Various forms of fear are seen in the novel which leads to taboos – they do not talk about the beastie, the mention of the boy with the birthmark becomes a taboo.

As the boys degenerate, their fears become increasingly powerful and increasingly irrational. They are becoming afraid of things they would not have thought of a few months earlier. As the number of taboos arise, the birth marked boy is never mentioned, and snakes are also not mentioned after the beast is seen. It too becomes a taboo. The fear demonstrated by these taboos is quite irrational. It amounts to a superstition that, ‘the thing named, is the thing itself’. The boys lose their hold on their former civilised ways and tend to become more and more a prey to these superstitions.

The major meaning of Golding’s novel is contained in this progression of fear – from the fear of the imagined beast to the fear of nothing at all. These fears shape the individual. According to William Golding, such fears turn man against man, for he cannot trust anyone when he does not what or who he is afraid of. The ultimate manifestation of the mutual distrust of man against man is violence and this is the ugly conclusion the novel moves to. The writer in the novel, at first establishes the nature of man as being naturally fearful, he then puts him in a situation that feeds his fears, then show fearful man as distrusting his fellows, then  dividing for security and finally trying to get rid of the fear by destroying everyone or everything that one is afraid of. This last method can never work because what one is really afraid of is not other people – it is oneself. The reason Golding has to take a pessimistic view of man is because man is primitive. Man does evils in this civilised society, he sets out to kill other men until he can control his fears and recognise that killing people is not the same as killing fear.