A Shred of Hope

[[deleted user]]

I just finished reading Lord of the Flies, probably for the fifth time, and I'm left feeling a little like a scavenger. I keep searching for some morsel of optimism, but I'm still hungry. (How is that for an overworked metaphor?) Is the novel really this dark, or am I'm missing something? Does anyone see something that I don't?

[Monty J]

Kenneth wrote: "I just finished reading Lord of the Flies, probably for the fifth time, and I'm left feeling a little like a scavenger. I keep searching for some morsel of optimism, but I'm still hungry. (How is..."

It's hypothetical, rather than realistic. The original intention, according to Golding, was as a rebuttal to the absurdly idealistic Disney-like novel, Coral Island. He just wanted to show that a different outcome was possible if a bunch of British boys were marooned on an island together. He wanted to make readers think, rather than have our heads fogged with fantasy.

He succeeded more than he dreamed. Because of the novel's timing, during the nuclear war panic of the post-WwII 1950s, it made us, Americans in particular, ponder afresh the threat of war. It also made us consider how easy it would be to slip into fascist rule when driven by fear.

It isn't meant as a prediction; only a heads-up. What it became was a warning.

He probably had read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), which leads up to Atlas Shrugged (1957)her formula for fascism. I assume Golding had read Fountainhead, and its implications were on his mind subconsciously as he wrote LOTF (1954). Or maybe not, because fascism was alive and well in Britain then, as it certainly was in Fascist Spain (1939-75.)

[Feliks]

Fascism certainly did have a strong heyday in Britain in the 30s and 40s. Well said, Monty.