Just Finished Reading Lord of the Flies by William Golding

William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is one of the most famous stories of the last century...and it has become a common high school English class reading assignment.  I know my sister Anita had to read it, but somehow my own teachers never got around to inserting it into their curriculum.  That's probably just as well, because having to read a book in order to get a good grade tended to make me resent it instead of appreciating it for its own worth, as I am now in a position to do. So perhaps a bit belatedly...but more willingly...I finally got around to reading Golding's crowning work...

I had already possessed a sketchy knowledge about what happens in Lord of the Flies for many years.  A marooned group of preadolescent English boys on an uninhabited tropical ocean island must fend for themselves, their plight having come about when the airplane transporting them from war to safety is itself attacked, the adults killed and the plane destroyed, leaving only the boys as survivors.  As they group together on the island and decide how to govern themselves and what should be their priorites, three figures emerge among the older boys: Ralph, who is elected chief and wants a constant fire set and tended in order to attract rescuers, Jack, Ralph's rival for leadership, who becomes obsessed with successfully hunting down the island's native pigs for food, and Piggy, a chubby, myopic, and asthmatic boy who, in spite of the taunts he receives from the others, possesses the greatest intellect and common sense of the bunch.  As the days go on, the boys' struggle for survival and rescue transforms itself into a power struggle for leadership and direction...ultimately turning into a conflict mirroring the outside world's "grown-up" war as the civilized society they were brought up in degenerates into savagery...

Without going into how the story ends...I encourage you to read it for yourself...I have two reactions from Lord of the Flies.  One is that the boys employed a system for speaking at assemblies: whoever held the designated conch shell had the floor and theoretically could not be interrupted.  However, poor Piggy could never be respected in this regard and was always being interrupted and derided whenever he spoke.  This reminded me of the double standards and favoritism people often face in supposedly orderly, "fair" processes when authority figures pick and choose by whim when and on whose behalf they decide to follow the set rules.  My other reaction to this story is how much it reminded me of how my (male) classmates behaved at my school's bus stop, from the fourth grade (when I began to ride a school bus) well into high school.  Bullying and scapegoating were rampant and there was a continuous struggle for who could be seen as the toughest...not a very favorable environment for me to start and finish the school day.  Yes, William Golding sure got it right...