British writer William Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, was knighted in 1988 and was named third by The Times as one of the "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945".
Lord of the Flies was William Golding's first work and his masterpiece. The book tells the story of a group of British boys trapped on an uninhabited desert island, who at first live in harmony and build a homeland, but later due to the intensification of conflicts of interest, the struggle for power and profit, the evil nature is lured out, and finally ends up killing each other.
This is a philosophical novel with strong metaphorical colors, the author uses the innocent and kind character characteristics of children to expound the heavy theme of human nature and evil, obviously a group of children who are not yet minors, but they can do evil but more ferocious than adults, when the childlike heart is extinguished, when the animal nature diverges, what is left for us is a human tragedy, and after reading it, people shudder.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="78" >01 Seemingly innocent and harmonious children, each pregnant with a ghost fetus in front of the interests</h1>
During the author's fantasy of World War III, a British plane crashed on an isolated island in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, and the only survivors were a group of children between the ages of six and twelve.
The boy Ralph and a bespectacled boy nicknamed "Piglet" find a conch, which Ralph uses as a horn to summon all the survivors to an area for a meeting, and Ralph stipulates that whoever holds the "conch" has a say.
Since Ralph first used conch to bring all the survivors together, he naturally established the most basic authority over the other boys and was soon elected "chief".
Ralph, Jack, and a boy named Simon quickly form a loose trio, with Ralph having absolute leadership. He arranged for others to divide into small groups to gather food, pick up branches to build houses, and light a pile of fireworks to signal for help at sea, while Jack organized his choir into a hunting party to go out and find sources of food.
However, the group life in the special environment exposes the dark side of human nature, and the originally orderly group order soon becomes disorganized.
The basic responsibilities of building shelters and guarding the fire, and arguably the basic obligations, were ignored, and some people thought that these boring trifles restricted their personal freedom, and they left their posts and chose to go hunting with Jack.
The difference between individualism and collectivism, the consideration of public or private, has become an irreconcilable contradiction, and the unbreakable alliance is not shaken by external forces, but begins to decay from within, and division becomes an inevitable trend.
In this way, the children were divided into two factions, led by Ralph and Jack. In order to compete for the leadership of this small island and gain the power and majesty to give orders, the two factions began to calculate their own tricks, fighting openly and secretly, and staged a fight intertwined with violence and bloodshed.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="138" >02 In order to compete for leadership, children expose the evil in their hearts</h1>
At first, everyone was optimistic about the adventure life on the island, and they spent all day on the desert island, which was extremely happy. But at this time, a young child with a fetal mole on his face said in fear that he had seen a huge "monster", and panic spread in the crowd, and everyone was shrouded in fear of the unknown all day long, and everyone was in danger.
To get rid of this panic, the daring Jack kills a sow in the camp and pokes her head on a stick to worship the monster, but Simon hallucinates when he hears the dead pig's head (the hallucination he produces that he thinks it's the Lord of the Flies on the pig's head) talking to him and telling him to do something.
Later, Simon realized that all these fears were imaginary illusions in the hearts of everyone, and the so-called monsters were just their own demons, but in fact, they did not exist at all.
When he rushed down the hill to tell the others the secret, because it was dark, the panicked people regarded him as a monster and killed him.
There were fewer and fewer people around Ralph and more and more people on Jack's side, but because Jack didn't have the tools to make a fire, they raided Ralph in the night and snatched piglet's glasses with only half of the lenses left.
After the glasses were snatched away, Ralph they could no longer make a fire and light a fire to signal for help, so they decided to get their glasses back from Jack, and they had a fierce fight with Jack, and the little piglet without vision was brutally stoned by Roger, and all this was seen by Ralph, but he chose to remain indifferent.
At the same time that the piglet is killed, Ralph's henchmen are also captured, Jack and his hunters regard Ralph as the only remaining rebel, killing him and no one opposes them anymore, Roger picks up the sharpened stick and prepares to kill Ralph like a wild boar.
In order to leave Ralph with nowhere to hide, they set fire to the forest, and Ralph was forced to roam around and have nowhere to hide, and later saved Ralph when the British Royal Navy ships passed through the desert island.
The officer went to the island and saw Ralph and a group of "savages". Ralph called him the captain of the island and wept sadly for the first time on the island.
At the end of the story, the desert island presents such a sad and miserable scene: "The island has been completely burned down, like a piece of rotten wood", "Ralph's tears can't help but flow like rain, and he weeps for the extinction of his childlike heart and the darkness of human nature." ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="140" >03 Human nature is inherently evil? Innocent children expose the grey areas of human nature</h1>
The cruelty of Lord of the Flies is how real it is, it tells the wonderful story of a realistic dystopian novel, it gives you a possible world scene, a bunch of very human characters, and then it shows that when they get into a terrible situation, what you want can happen: they act like monsters.
What author Golding shows us is that we are not so far from our original nature and the so-called killer instinct, and that we can embrace our dark side with just a slight nudge from the standard world in which we live.
The boys act according to what they see in the world (though they don't understand the limits). Power creates authority, and violence is a way to achieve the peace you want, and that's a great irony.
They go to war between their peers and lose the innocence of their childhood. They grew up almost overnight, and they learned what humans can do when pushed. They become "barbarians" who reject civilization and create their own civilization—just a civilization without any rules, of their own volition, where a vile tyrant is the chief.
The book sends out a deafening heavenly question: "What are we?" mankind? Or an animal? Or barbarians? ”
The Lord of the Flies is rich in meaning, and since its inception, many scholars have interpreted it in different ways, and like all great works of literature, it may mean a lot of things, but it can also mean nothing.
But admittedly, this is a very clever work, and we can draw many historical similarities from the message conveyed by the novel. It can even be reflected in today's human society, and the commonalities carried by human beings can be found in books.
You can choose to think of the charismatic and manipulative Jack Méridu as Hitler, who exploited the weakest side of a group of people. When society is in a state of chaos, dictators and radicals often find it easy to slip into...
We don't have to assume that the author believes that everyone everywhere is evil, it's just that when we find ourselves in precarious situations, when we find that our survival interests are jeopardized, we are capable and willing to do so.
As a quote in the book says, "We did everything an adult would do." What went wrong? ”
The mistake is that we have done everything that adults would do, and yet we have taken it as the truth that is always right!