Lord of the Flies Analysis

Before we get down to the details, we should address the fact that Lord of the Flies is one big allegory. Symbols aside, the boys as a whole can represent humanity as a whole. You can see where the...

Lord of the Flies takes place on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, at an unknown year during a fictional atomic war. Other than the war, there’s nothing “futuristic” abo...

The narrator in Lord of the Flies moves back and forth (omnisciently, as you might imagine) between different scenes and thoughts. The best example of this is Chapter Eight, when we jump back and f...

What's the opposite of a utopia, or an ideal community? It's the frightening society of hunters that Jack constructs in Lord of the Flies. This wildly superstitious and violent group of boys (who a...

If you like things sugar-coated, this is not the book for you. Golding takes a look at the worst, darkest side of human nature and reports back, with exaggeration and poetical bits thrown in for st...

Much like the forbidding, unknown patch of abandoned jungle in which the book takes place (for more on that, see "Setting," the writing style for Lord of the Flies is rich, and dark. Think of a rea...

You can approach this title on a few different levels. To begin, “the Lord of the Flies” is the name of the pig’s head after being impaled on a stick. This seems a natural choice...

Plane crashed, no parents.As Ralph and Piggy find the conch and call a meeting, the initial situation is on its way. Part of the set-up is in discovering the island, part in discovering the other c...

Crash and burnWhen their plane crashes, the boys who were on board find themselves on a strange island where they have never been before. Needless to say, this is a new situation for them. They hap...

The boys arrive on the island, realize that no adults are present, and begin to organize themselves. Ralph is elected chief. Jack takes over the group of hunters. The boys explore the island and fi...

Something around twenty publishers rejected Lord of the Flies.William Golding was knighted in 1988. Make that Sir William Golding. Rock Band Iron Maiden wrote a song called “Lord of the Flies...

While there is no downright sex in Lord of the Flies, we would like to draw your attention to a highly disturbing scene in Chapter Eight when the boys kill a female pig. The sexual violence of the...

R.M. Ballantyne: The Coral Island – the names “Ralph,” “Jack,” and “Simon” (2.59; 12.247) – The Coral Island was a classic 1857 “Europe can bet...