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Lord of the Flies | Teaching Rationale for William Golding's Lord of the Flies

In the following excerpt, Paul Slayton finds Lord of the Flies to be a parable about modern civilization and human morality, and describes Golding's literary techniques.

Lord of the Flies is William Golding's parable of life in the latter half of the twentieth century, the nuclear age, when society seems to have reached technological maturity while human morality is still prepubescent. Whether or not one agrees with the pessimistic philosophy, the idiocentric psychology or the fundamentalist theology espoused by Golding in the novel, if one is to use literature as a "window on the world," this work is one of the panes through which one should look.

The setting for Lord of the Flies is in the literary tradition of Daniel...

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