Jan 1, 2010

The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies ( 1954 ),
a novel by W. Golding .

An aeroplane carrying a party of schoolboys crashes on a desert island. The boys' attempts, led by Ralph and Piggy, to set up a democratically run society quickly fail and the savagery which in Golding's work underlies man's true nature takes over. Terror rules under the dictator Jack, and two boys are killed; it is only with the arrival of a shocked rescue officer that a mask of civilization returns. It is a savage reply to the naïve optimism of Ballantyne 's The Coral Island. (See also Beelzebub .)