Lord of the Flies

Characters

Ralph is elected chief and thinks survival and rescue are the most important things; Jack, the head chorister, becomes a violent dictator; Piggy is the rational outsider who trusts science; and Roger is a sadistic boy who kills Piggy.

Context

Golding was thinking of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), in which three shipwrecked boys called Ralph, Jack and Peterkin live happily without adults; Golding set out to turn this kind of fiction on its head.

Key quotations

The boys' chant as they attack Simon: "Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!". It shows increasing violence and mob frenzy.

Language and form

In the allegory Ralph represents civilisation, order and democracy; Jack savagery, disorder and dictatorship; Piggy rational scientific thought; Simon human morality and goodness; and the island is a microcosm of the wider world.

Plot and structure

The structure is chronological, with events revealed in the order they happened, and the book is divided into 12 chapters whose titles summarise key events.

Themes

The Beast takes many forms (a dream, a snake or sea monster, the dead pilot's body), but the real Beast is the evil inside the boys, which only Simon fully realises.

Characters

The boys mostly seem to come from upper middle class backgrounds, with prep school and boarding experience; the exception is Piggy, who seems to come from a different class and is treated as an outsider.

Context

Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940 and spent six years afloat, including action against the Bismarck and the D-Day invasion.

Key quotations

The pig's head tells Simon "I'm part of you". It shows that the evil the boys fear lives inside them.

Language and form

An allegory is a narrative with a symbolic, deeper level of meaning, in which characters, setting, objects and colours stand for bigger ideas; it can be seen as a very long extended metaphor.