Analysis

Lord of the Flies dramatizes a fundamental human struggle: the conflict between the impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and act lawfully, and the impulse to seek brute power over others, act selfishly, behave in a way that will gratify one's desires, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence. The first set of impulses might be thought of as the "civilizing instinct," which encourages people to work together toward common goals and behave peacefully; the second set of impulses might be thought of as the "barbarizing instinct," or the instinct to savagery, which urges people to rebel against civilization, seeking anarchy, chaos, despotism, and violence. The novel's structure and style are extremely straightforward and simple, entirely devoted to the story, as opposed to poetic language, description, or philosophical interludes. The novel is also allegorical, which means that characters and objects directly represent the book's central thematic ideas.

        In Lord of the Flies, the civilizing impulse is represented by a number of key characters and symbols, including Ralph, Piggy, and the conch shell the boys use to call meetings. The instinct to savagery is represented by Jack, Roger, the tribal hunting dance, and the decapitated sow's head that comes to be known as the Lord of the Flies. The conflict between Jack and Ralph, as it develops, represents the conflict between the civilizing impulse and the impulse to savagery both within the individual and within society as a whole, as the boys marooned on the island gradually reject the restraints of civilization in favor of a primal, violent, primitive existence of hunting, feasting, and homicide.

  Because its story is allegorical, Lord of the Flies can be interpreted in many ways; during the 1950s and 1960s, a number of readings of the book attempted to connect it with extraordinarily grand historical, religious, and psychological schemes, claiming that the book dramatized the history of civilization or the history of religion, or the struggle between the Freudian components of unconscious identity--id, ego, and superego. There is a glimmer of truth in each of these readings--the book does deal with fundamental human tendencies, but it is important to remember that the novel's philosophical register is really quite limited--almost entirely restricted to the two extremes represented by Ralph and Jack--and is certainly not complex or subtle enough to offer a realistic parallel to the history of human endeavors as a whole. Every element of Lord of the Flies is sublimated to the book's exploration of its particular philosophical conflict.

  The one truly complicating element in the novel is the character of Simon. Whereas Piggy represents the scientific, intellectual, and rational aspects of civilization, Simon seems to represent a kind of innate, spiritual human goodness, deeply connected with nature and, in its own way, as primal as Jack and Roger's primal evil. The other characters in the novel abandon moral behavior as soon as civilization no longer imposes it upon them; they are not innately moral, but have simply been conditioned to act morally by the adult world, by the threat of punishment for misdeeds. This is true even of Ralph and Piggy to an extent; in the psychology of the novel, the civilizing impulse is not as deeply rooted in the human psyche as the savage impulse. But Simon continues to act morally on the island; he behaves kindly to the younger children, and he is the first to realize the problem posed by the beast and the Lord of the Flies--that there is no external monster, but that rather a monster lurks within each human being. This idea finds representation in the sow's head, and eventually stands as the moral conclusion of the novel. The main problem of the book is the idea of inherent human evil; against this, Simon seems to represent an idea of essential human goodness--yet his brutal murder by the other boys near the end of the book indicates the scarcity of that goodness amid an overwhelming abundance of evil.

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