William Golding

Lord of the Flies is one of those novels that you read in high school. Except that I didn't. So I've taken it up now. Here are a few observations now that I'm done: 

• In general, I'm not moved by novels about children, or in which children play a primary role. I recognize that Lord of the Flies is about more than children, but there's no way around the fact that they drive the book's progression, and serve as its main characters. 

• One question which the novel seems to pose is whether adults, if marooned on an island in the same way as Golding's children, would organize themselves in a similar fashion, and whether they would take recourse to violence as a result of a related set of pressures. 

• I suspect that, in response to Golding's question, the answer is yes -- that adults would divide themselves between the primal and the reflective. This dichotomy may not be as pronounced as Golding presents it, but the distinction is real, and would manifest itself similarly, I think, in adults. 

Ultimately, Golding positions naivety against survival: the result -- in his reading -- is a set of conclusions which can be generalized about humanity. When and how humans come into conflict is a primary concern. Equally, Golding poses a question about how humans organize themselves, and whether that sense of organization is innate, or genetically coded. 

These are interesting questions, and there's no question that Golding's novel builds toward a crescendo. I take all of this as true: but I do wonder whether the experience of abandoned children would have been even more brutal than what Lord of the Flies presents. That became a distraction for me: despite his book's realism, how realistic are Golding's visions and conclusions?