Finished: December 23, 2024
Why I read this
It’s been a long time since I visited the abandoned Island with Ralph, Piggy, and Jack. Yet The Lord of The Flies is one of those books that calls you back over and over, and being such a quick read, it takes such a low commitment that there’s no reason not to go back from time to time. It also happened to coincide with watching Lost for a second time with my fiancé and (for obvious reasons) the two go well together. So when I saw the famous title on a shelf in a French book store (but fortunately in English) I picked it up thinking whether it was worth it to go back and read it again. Seeing me looking it over, my fiancé bought it for me, and from there it was easy to bump it up to the top of my list.
What I learned
I’m not sure of all of the things that I did or did not capture when I first read this book in adolescence, but there are a certain few things that stood out to me that I am sure I did not fully understand. I won’t go over the classic main themes of the inherent evil within men, or the disorder that is certain to follow any society without rules. Instead I wanted to focus on more subtle things I noticed.
First was the fact that I never understood the overall context of The Lord of The Flies. I never realized that behind it all there is the reference of a raging global war in which society at large is falling apart. So while the world is in a universal descent, the children play out the same rise and fall in a matter of weeks as opposed to centuries. They create society, they discover fire, they impose government, but as these things crack, their system quickly falls apart and descends into the same warlike anarchy.
Now the difference between the island and the boys, compared to the world at large is the fact that at the end of it all they are simply children. Spoiler alert, but at the end of the book when confronted again with an adult, the chaos and anarchy is immediately rectified. We do not know what the consequences might be for the characters, but we can assume that the moment they are returned to the larger society from which they come they will surely return to normal habits. They will recreate there formal selves, and the savagery will quickly fade into their pasts. Once a choir boy, then a tribal chieftain, Jack will be a choir boy again in no time. But the wider global civilization doesn’t have an adult to rescue them from their peril. Looking at our modern world, we are in a time where things seem to be falling apart everywhere we look. In the Middle East in Israel and Syria, in Europe in Ukraine, in South America in Venezuela, in Asia with China and Taiwan, even the US with the apparently degrading political system and increasingly polarized population. Everywhere we seem bound for the chaos the boys experienced once the rule of law broke down. When broken down it was clear the boys were not capable of taking care of this situation. There was almost no imaginable scenario in which their differences could have been resolved through non-violent and normal methods. If our own international system breaks down how will we repair it? What could be our equivalent of the adult at the end of the story who can instantly impose on us our guided social order? If there is no adult, how can we avoid the seemingly accelerating race towards the point of no return?
What I didn’t like
I could not help but thinking throughout the entire read that the events that were taking place could not be realistic. I know it’s supposed to represent the how base humans really are, but I simply could not believe young boys would act that way if abandoned on an island. Note that these were not boys in gangs or already heavily corrupted, the leader of the offenders was even the leader of a choir. Young kids will rough house sure, but from my experience the second anyone gets hurt everything comes to a screeching halt. I remember being a boy scout and we too thought it was fun to roll rocks down a hill just to see the destruction. We would play a game where kids at the top of the hill would roll rocks while kids would try to climb up the hill at the same time. As one could expect, there was one time someone rolling a rock hit another scout in the head. Immediately all the joking and playing stopped. All the kids rushed to the side of the hurt one, adults were called, and the game was never repeated by any of those present. A crisis brought us together instantly and there was no thought about continuing. So I refuse to believe that boys, even in such a stressful situation as this, would continue with such barbarity after seeing the results, much less to continue to perform more and more violent acts.
It’ll be recommended in my books I liked similar to this one, but Humankind by Rutger Bregman tells a real story of boys who were shipwrecked in the South Pacific and it was interesting to see that they did exactly the opposite of what is described in The Lord of The Flies. It is only one example, but there is no example (that I know of) of boys doing what was described here by Golding.
Questions I asked
How was my perspective of this book different when I read it when I was younger? Did I understand all the same things?
What could be the equivalent of the adult to rescue us from our currently degrading political conditions?
Why are children so often exceptional characters even for adult readers?
My Favorite Quote
“He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.”
William Golding
Books I liked like this one
Humankind : Rutger Bregman (for his analysis of The Lord of the Flies and what might happen in the real world on an abandoned island)
Heart of Darkness : Joseph Conrad (for a look into the darker parts of human psychology)
Book Reviews for Mom 