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William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies': A Review

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Lord of the flies is anything but an easy book to digest. It comes upon the reader like a heavy meal on a suffocating summer's day. The main idea is fairly simple actually: a group of children stranded on an isolated island are trying to reenact the norms of the society they used to live in before their arrival on the island. Gradually, things descend more violently with the children looking to kill the beast that lives in the heart of the jungle. What they are unable to realize though is that the only beast on the island is the one that lurks within their own selves. Overall, William Golding's novel is a sad allegory on the human nature which tends to return to primitivism when man is faced with conditions outside the norms of society: isolation, and the lack of either a spatial or temporal landmark. Golding's image of good and evil in the book is a bitter medicine to swallow; nevertheless, we must do so in order to understand his intentions. At the time of its initial publishing in 1954, Lord of the Flies passed mostly unnoticed but the poor interest it received increased several years later when its notoriety expanded almost instantly. But in 1954, Golding's aspiration to publish his novel was no random initiative. He had returned home after fighting in World War II with a deep understanding of the human nature. Golding's idea of war was not merely depicting soldiers battling on the fronts but it was a war of man's instinctual demeanor. It was war that had taught him

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