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Human Nature in “Lord of the Flies” by Golding Essay

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Lord of the Flies is a remarkable, allegorical novel written by William Golding and published in 1954. It is possible to say that when creating this piece, the author was largely inspired by the events that took place in the first half of the 20th century and World War II, in particular. As the international community submerged in multiple conflicts, injustices, blind aggression and violence became extremely common and seemed to be promoted by the political agendas in many countries. Thus, there is no surprise that, in his masterpiece, Golding chose to explore the nature of human cruelty. It is considered that evil and aggression are intrinsic parts of human nature and can be either manifested in reality or hidden depending on the circumstances. Fear and chaos are considered to be among the major factors that make people cruel. Considering this, the present paper will analyze the validity of the given statement by drawing on the experiences of characters in Lord of the Flies and evaluating the conditions in which they lived.

The novel’s plot gradually unfolds when a group of boys is cast ashore on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. At first, they manage to take care of themselves without adults’ supervision and maintain constructive relationships inside the group. Nevertheless, soon after, their community falls apart and more and more disorder and fear descend on them. The two characters, Ralph and Jack, take leading positions in the conflict, and Golding endows them with opposing qualities. While Ralph is in favor of civilization and strives to come back to it, values peace, and tries to do good for all boys on the island, Jack is inherently more aggressive, uncompromisable, and manipulative. For example, Ralph’s insistence on compliance with the “conch rule” during the group discussions is an example of his attempts to maintain order in the group, whereas Jack’s keen interest in hunting illustrates his aggressiveness and thirst for blood.

It is worth noticing that Jack initially accepts Ralph’s leadership and tries to comply with the rules. However, over a short period, his behavior becomes more deviant as he fully realizes the freedom of living on an uninhabited island. His opposition to Ralph is symbolic because the latter character represents civilization and morality. Since there is no need to comply with social norms and laws, Jack lets his natural inclinations for aggression and cruelty, which were otherwise suppressed when he lived in society, manifest to their full.

At the same time, in situations when Jack’s influence increases, Ralph tends to lose control and forget his morality more easily. For instance, in the scene where Robert pretends to be a pig as part of a mock-hunt game and others pretend to be hunters aiming to kill him, Ralph became “carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric’s spear and jabbed at Robert with it” (Golding). Later, as everyone is trying to catch and hit Robert as a pig, “Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh” and his “desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering” (Golding). This episode demonstrates that cruelty is also like Ralph. It becomes expressed when, during the game, he turns less conscious of strict behavioral rules and when everyone around seems to forget about them as well, giving way to their basic, almost animal-like, emotions. Thus, this mock-hunt is a perfect example of a chaotic situation in which moral values have no power and others’ feelings no longer count.

To a significant extent, fear also contributes to the characters’ aggression in the novel. All the boys on the island are afraid of the beast, which, however, is just imaginary. Ralph attempts to persuade them that the beast does not exist and even arranges a meeting “to talk about this fear and decide there’s nothing in it” (Golding). In this way, he tries to maintain order and keep the group cohesive. At the same time, Jack uses others’ fear of the beast to gain power, manipulate others, and create a divide in the community. Consequently, fear overwhelms Ralph as well, and together with Piggy, he finds himself “eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society” that Jack had created (Golding).

Ultimately, the fear and the frenzy that takes hold of the boys’ minds in the moments of chaos leads to one of the most tragic events described in Lord of the Flies – Simon’s death. The killing of the latter character is symbolic since he is the most innocent and pure among all others in the book. Moreover, he is the most intuitive and, thus, first comes to realize that the beast is, in fact, nothing but the darkness that hides inside. It is Simon who understands that the beast is part of every human’s nature and, therefore, the boys are threatened by themselves and each other more than anything else on the island.

It is valid to say that the abovementioned statement is one of the main ideas that Golding wanted to convey in Lord of the Flies. He showed that in some circumstances it becomes harder to keep a civilized face and live by ethical values. Moreover, by instilling and using fear, one can easily manipulate others. Regardless of a seemingly pessimistic message, the novel teaches readers to become more aware of their inclinations and strive to do good despite circumstances and pressure from the majority.

Golding, W. (2014). Lord of the flies . New York, NY: Spark Publishing.

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Lord of the Flies

William golding.

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William Golding once said that in writing Lord of the Flies he aimed to trace society's flaws back to their source in human nature. By leaving a group of English schoolboys to fend for themselves on a remote jungle island, Golding creates a kind of human nature laboratory in order to examine what happens when the constraints of civilization vanish and raw human nature takes over. In Lord of the Flies , Golding argues that human nature, free from the constraints of society, draws people away from reason toward savagery.

The makeshift civilization the boys form in Lord of the Flies collapses under the weight of their innate savagery: rather than follow rules and work hard, they pursue fun, succumb to fear, and fall to violence. Golding's underlying argument is that human beings are savage by nature, and are moved by primal urges toward selfishness, brutality, and dominance over others. Though the boys think the beast lives in the jungle, Golding makes it clear that it lurks only in their hearts.

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The Profound Themes of Human Nature in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding

This essay about “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding explores the novel’s themes of human nature civilization and savagery. It examines how the story of British boys stranded on a deserted island illustrates the thin line between civilized behavior and primal instincts. The essay highlights the characters of Ralph and Jack whose leadership styles and actions represent the struggle between order and chaos. It also discusses the symbolic significance of the “Lord of the Flies” and the loss of innocence experienced by the boys. The essay concludes by reflecting on Golding’s commentary on the fragility of societal order and the inherent darkness within humans.

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“Lord of the Flies” by William Golding is a gripping story that digs deep into the darker sides of human nature. It unfolds on a deserted island where a bunch of British boys find themselves stranded after a plane crash. Without the comforts of civilization they quickly unravel showing the raw flaws and instincts that lurk in all of us. Golding’s tale dives into how fragile civilization can be making it a timeless story that hits home with readers.

The novel kicks off with a group of boys aged six to twelve stranded on this empty island.

At first they try to keep things orderly like back home. Ralph one of the older kids gets picked as leader and tries hard to keep everyone in line stressing the need for a signal fire to get rescued. But as time goes on their little society falls apart. Cooperation gives way to power struggles and even violence.

At the heart of the story is Jack who starts out as a choirboy but turns into a fierce hunter. His journey shows how easy it is to ditch civility for savagery. As Jack and his gang get more into violence and strange beliefs chaos takes over the island. The “Lord of the Flies” a pig’s head on a stick becomes a symbol of evil and destruction within people—a major theme in Golding’s work.

The novel also dives into the loss of innocence. The boys’ descent into savagery is marked by cruel acts that clash hard with their initial innocence. The deaths of Simon and Piggy two of the more decent kids show just how much innocence can be lost and how dangerous human impulses can get. Simon especially is like a figure of goodness destroyed by the others—a heavy symbol of how brutal things can get.

Golding uses the island as a mini version of society a place where he can really dig into human behavior without all the rules. It’s like a test ground for the boys’ morals showing how fast order can vanish into chaos. This setup also lets Golding talk about how fragile civilization really is. Without rules and normal life the boys go back to their wildest instincts painting a dark picture of human nature.

The book ends with the boys getting rescued by a navy guy showing a huge gap between their savage island life and the civilized world they’re about to go back to. The officer’s shock at how wild they’ve gone is a big reminder of how thin that line is between civilization and chaos. Golding leaves readers thinking hard about the dark side in all of us and how easy it is for society to fall apart.

“Lord of the Flies” isn’t just a story—it’s a deep dive into what makes us human and how close we are to losing it all. Through these boys’ struggles Golding shines a light on the darkness inside us all and how quickly we can ditch the rules we live by. The book’s power lies in its honest look at these themes making it a story that sticks with you making you think long after you’ve put it down. As a sharp take on human nature “Lord of the Flies” keeps on grabbing readers urging them to really think about what it means to be human and how our world works.

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Home Essay Samples Literature Lord of The Flies

"Lord of the Flies": Human Nature in William Golding's Novel

Table of contents, the inherent savagery, the conflict between reason and instinct, the loss of civilization, the symbolism of the "beast", the message about human nature, references:.

• Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. Faber and Faber.
• Blank, M. (2004). Notes on William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". Barron's Educational Series.
• Kearns, K. M. (2010). Understanding "Lord of the Flies": A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents. Greenwood Publishing Group.
• Woodward, M. (2003). Understanding William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". Lucent Books.
• Baker, J. M. (2012). William Golding's "Lord of the Flies": A Reference Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group.

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Defects of (Human) Nature? Cognitive Biases in Golding’s Lord of the Flies

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• https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2023.2239705

“It’s Only Us”

“i know about people”, “we were together then”, “after all, we’re not savages”, “we’ll be like animals”, “burning wreckage of the island”.

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“Maybe,” he said hesitantly, “maybe there is a beast.”

The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement.

“You, Simon? You believe in this?”

“I don’t know,” said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. “But …. What I mean is …maybe it’s only us.” (119-20) Footnote 1

What follows is an onslaught of ridicule, anger, and fear with which the assembly rejects Simon’s shocking indictment, the intended warning only serving to further weaken the boys’ tenuous grasp on reality. Faced with an unbearable realization—that of their own culpability in the disturbing events on the island—they resort to outright denial as a shield against owning up to who they have become, or indeed who they’ve always been. The subsequent breakdown of communication leads to the breakup of the assembly and to Ralph’s dire prediction that if the social order they have created collapses for good, they (“us”) will become like animals and “never be rescued” (124).

Nearly seven decades on, LotF remains an essential work of fiction grappling with the notion of “human nature.” Golding’s own stated aim was to “trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature” (qtd. in Epstein 288), as his active service in World War II led him to conclude that “the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation” (qtd. in Reiff 29). Soon after publication, LotF was noted for combining psychoanalysis, anthropology, social psychology, and philosophical history to explore human personality and its reflection on society (Epstein 289). A “modern myth on an ancient theme” (Chellappan 3) and “the Robinson Crusoe of our time” (Tiger 133), LotF is often seen as revealing human darkness and evil (Gindin 18) through the boys’ inability to escape their essential nature of murderous savagery (R. Wilson 48). Having cast the novel as a timeless fable, myth, and allegory, conservative criticism, in particular, interprets Golding’s view of the human condition as universal and eternal, yet with its explorations of the contested lands between “rationality and irrationality, natural and supernatural, flesh and spirit, mouth and anus,” LotF proves highly responsive to changing cultural contexts (Crawford 28). Whether stripping away any pretense of confidence in human civilization (Gindin 16), implying that any attempts at resolving man-nature dualism would result in a descent into insanity (Talwar 200), or foregrounding the natural world to re-imagine the self in relation to it (Hanafy 16), the novel invites, indeed forces, its readers (and its author) to reckon with what it means to be, and become, human.

This essay applies and augments the toolkit of cognitive ecocriticism to investigate LotF’s insights into planetary predicaments faced by increasing numbers of individuals and communities across the globe. Scholarly explorations of nature and human nature in LotF to date have not yet attempted to examine this terrain through the lens of cognitive biases in their entanglement with the ongoing environmental crisis. A thus-far underutilized angle of literary analysis, cognitive biases open new interpretative vistas onto conceptual frames and cultural forces that (re)define human place, role, and behavior within nature. Given that humanity’s environmental footprint is ever larger and the disruption of the planetary ecosystem is ever clearer, it is worth asking whether the disturbing events on the unnamed fictional island are related to their equally—if not more—disturbing counterparts on the actual planet Earth.

In drilling down into the causes of social, political, and economic drivers of climate change and the wider planetary crisis, the mind and brain sciences have attracted attention of both academic and popular authors. Some explicitly strive to investigate why, despite pretentions to rationality, people find it hard to believe science-based warnings (Hamilton ix), whether knowledge of human nature can overcome psychological obstacles to climate action (Stoknes xv), and how climate change triggers cognitive biases against mobilizing a sufficient sense of urgency (Marshall 57). In one definition, cognitive biases/errors/illusions manifest themselves as “cases in which human cognition reliably produces representations that are systematically distorted compared to some aspect of objective reality” (Haselton et al. 968). Assuming for the purposes of this essay that “objective reality” refers to the planetary ecosystem interdependent with human civilization, it provides the foundation for the very physical existence of those prone to such representations. Far from random defects of cognition, these distortive tendencies are embedded in human cognitive capacities that arose through evolution of brain functions such as perception, memory, motor control, emotions, and consciousness (Edelman 77), promoted individual survival and reproduction in our evolutionary past (Johnson and Levin 1593), and are part of the mind’s “adaptive toolbox” in which intuitive decision-making heuristics are created and transmitted genetically, culturally, and individually (Gigerenzer 19). Intersections and interactions between cognitive biases, personal and social values, and realities of life in the Anthropocene can produce cognitive dissonance, that is, an uncomfortable inner tension born of conflicting feelings, thoughts, and behaviors (Stoknes 61), which humans attempt to resolve often through changing their cognitions (Norgaard 68). Given that human psychology evolved in settings unlike the globalized and technologized world of today (Johnson and Levin 1600) and that human perceptions are among the key contributors to (and consequences of) the ongoing climate disruption (Clayton and Manning 3), it is high time to recognize that finding solutions requires acknowledging the centrality of human psychology (Du Nann Winter and Koger xvii).

Golding’s thesis in LotF was that “you could have taken any bunch of boys from any country and stuck them on an island and you would have ended up with mayhem” (Golding and Baker 136), a sweeping generalization that infuses LotF with its grim relentlessness. “I been in bed so much I done some thinking,” says Piggy after the failed assembly reveals the deadly rift within the boys’ community on the island, and goes on to assert, “I know about people” (126), referring to Jack’s motivations and the threat he poses. Piggy’s confidence in his powers of seeing into the mind of another human being may initially seem unwarranted but is tragically borne out by subsequent events. If “knowing about people” has long been the goal of the human project, then the scientific paradigm that arose with the early modern period brought a new sense of confidence. For all the perennial philosophical and religious debate, already in Golding’s own lifetime it was scientific insights into the biological underpinnings of human behavior that joined the game: gradually, evolutionary biology and neuroscience constructed a new—and fiercely debated—understanding of what animates human thoughts and actions that aims not so much to supplement religious and philosophical ones as to supersede them. Having become a popular classic that mirrored emerging sociobiological investigations (Tiger 135), LotF must have been in the back of the mind of many a researcher and author. Today, it can be seen as a dramatization of cognitive biases in the quest for reinterpreting human (and specifically male) nature in its relation to the wider world.

In the 2004 preface to a new edition of his pivotal and controversial 1979 work On Human Nature , E.O. Wilson claims that human nature is “composed of the complex biases of passion and learning propensities often loosely referred to as instincts” that developed over millions of years, and while evolving “in response to environmental and historical contingencies,” culture’s trajectories are powerfully guided by our species’ inborn biases (x). One does not need to buy into Wilson’s other big idea, that of the unity of knowledge or “consilience” (that he argued for in the 1998 book of the same name), much less give any credit to discriminatory applications of evolutionary narratives against vulnerable populations in the not-so-distant past, when the discourse of “nature” legitimized divisions, intolerance, and destructive conceptions of identity (Soper 250), in order to appreciate the insights provided by evolutionary perspectives on a range of issues. In Beast and Man , her classic study on human nature, Mary Midgley notes how Wilson’s sociobiological treatise profoundly changed the human nature debate that raged in the 1960s and 1970s, not least through generating spirited pushback to its provocative language and ideological insistence on the authority of science in finding adaptive explanations for every behavior and trait, but at the same time gained fervent support from those who applauded its resistance to “the strange segregation of humans from their kindred that has deformed much of Enlightenment thought, a segregation which has indeed terribly delayed our realization of environmental damage itself” (xxiii-xxiv). Published in the aftermath of a disastrous war and—unwittingly to the author—at the outset of what was later termed the Great Acceleration, when carbon emissions shot up alongside multiple other indicators of global environmental modification by humans (Crutzen; Zalasiewicz et al.), LotF provides a counterpoint to the confident narrative of progress handed down from the Enlightenment.

Wilson and other authors in his school of thought reject not only the notion of the eternal soul tainted by the original sin and subject to a divine power, but also of the human mind as a blank slate upon which the society inscribes all content in terms of values and patterns of behavior. Foregrounding our common humanity predicated on shared evolutionary origin, these thinkers call for the recognition of the innate human capacity for “love, friendship, cooperation, and learning” that allows us to foster mutual understanding across distinctions and divisions (Christakis xvii-xviii). Humans are genetically primed to acquire culture as a survival strategy but not to acquire any particular set of cultural characteristics (Pagel 5), leading to the cultural diversity across the globe and the spectrum of behaviors that humans engage in. Paul Ehrlich underscores this point by using the plural term human natures defined as “diverse products of change, of long genetic and, especially, cultural evolutionary processes” (13). Importantly, there is no moral determinism in recognizing the evolutionary dimension of human behavior: in the words of Frans de Waal, “Instead of human nature’s being either fundamentally brutish or fundamentally noble, it is both” (5). Alongside collaborative and beneficent impulses that generate love and friendship, humans possess competitive and violent ones that enable conflict and hatred (Christakis 418), and even seemingly positive urges such as cooperation can be utilized for good as well as evil ends. That these underlying forces may go unrecognized is reflected in LotF’s original title: Golding readily agreed to a new one recommended by an editor, with its appropriately diabolical meaning, but “ Strangers from Within ” remains a valuable reminder of his unwavering focus on “the gradual effacement of sane and civil behavior and the emergence of an alien power in the consciousness of the boys” (Baker 95). Anyone who ever did something “out of character” may recognize the sensation of becoming a stranger to oneself, and history provides countless examples of communities and cultures committing acts that were ostensibly alien to their stated cherished values. In Golding’s own words, “we’ve done some things in this century that we didn’t think human beings could do and which are indescribable” (Golding and Baker 131). In the age of planetary disruption, isn’t the entire modern civilization that is supposedly founded on the vision of progress and betterment in fact sleepwalking into the very rejection of those goals? The worlds that the LotF boys left and then built serve as a warning against any comforting narratives of the inevitable human success.

While the environment (including the genome) shapes culture, culture shapes the environment in turn, thus contributing to the course of human evolution (Lent 21), making it all the more important to identify social, political, and economic conditions and other cultural factors as drivers of change that increase the likelihood of generating specific behaviors and attitudes. With the way culture(s) and genes co-evolve still very much under investigation, the precise points at which biological and cultural forces intersect and the proportionality of their respective impacts on any given psychological and social phenomenon can and should be debated, but the role of our species’ evolved past in certain behavioral attributes cannot be dismissed. Dichotomous approaches to the nature vs. nurture debate preclude the insight that “we are neither made nor born,” with human culture providing a range of opportunities for encouraging genetic variety in preferences and abilities, which allows us to fill different roles and adopt diverse strategies made available by the environments we co-create (Pagel 113–19). Indeed, without appreciating the role of history and deep time, we risk overemphasizing genes over gene-culture coevolution and overlooking cultural variations in genetic expression (Smail 201). Despite the fact that formulating language capable of crossing the nature-culture divide has been difficult because “most Western terminology is always already rooted to one side or the other” (Alaimo, Exposed 179), the efforts of thinkers, scientists, and policymakers to dismantle the dichotomy between humans and the natural world and to reintegrate the former into the latter have been accelerating since at least the nineteenth century (Christakis 393). To the extent that they straddle the supposed nature-culture division, cognitive biases provide a new window onto the man-nature dualism: a long-standing strategy for creating a mental comfort zone where humans can ostensibly shelter their affairs from the “external” world, which they then exploit and dominate, confident of their immunity from the worst consequences of their actions. An outgrowth of the ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian thought, man-nature dualism has challenged and sidelined alternative systems of conceptualizing human place in nature, from the hunter-gatherers’ belief in the universal connection between all beings to the traditional integrated cosmology of China (Lent 35). For Val Plumwood, the resulting hyperseparation and human-centeredness (paralleled by male-centeredness) leads to treating non-humans (and non-males) as “slaves or mere tools,” thus misunderstanding our place within ecosystems and disregarding the direct and indirect hazards to non-humans and humans alike (444–45). While climate change is often described as an “environmental problem,” it is also a “human problem” in that it is human behavior that is responsible, human beings that are affected, and human behavioral change that is required (Clayton and Manning, “Preface” xi). This statement, true as it is, still understates the connection between humans and their surroundings: indeed, humans are within nature as much as of it—or, to use Stacy Alaimo’s formulation, the environment “is always the very substance of ourselves” ( Bodily Natures 4).

I think it’s a question of self-awareness, is it not? I think we have to assume that animals, cows, horses and the like, have a kind of dream consciousness, that they have not our own acute sense of identity. This is a guess because I’ve never been a horse, but I would guess that a horse hasn’t got quite so acute a sense either of his own “I amness” or of himself tomorrow or even of himself yesterday. Now with our awareness of ourselves as individuals inescapably comes in this other thing, this destructive thing, the evil, if you like. It seems to me that this self-awareness, intelligence, with these come the defect of their virtue. We have to learn, and it’s quite possible, I think, that we never shall learn, that as a species that will be the thing which will trip us up, our own intelligence and our own lusts. But if we are going to survive those two aspects of man, his selfishness and his intelligence, we’ve got to learn to control those, otherwise they tend to destroy us. I think they are what mark us off from the animal kingdom, so far as we are marked off from it. (Golding and Baker 134–35)

The capacity for conscious reflection being generated not only in interaction with ourselves, but rather with our world as beings embedded in a larger web of life (Abram 110), cognitive science should not focus on the human mind in isolation from the more-than-human reality. To do otherwise would only confirm criticisms that “much—perhaps even most—of the work done in cognitive science seems more or less useless because it has been ignorant of (or, worse, has deliberately chosen to disregard) the literal corporeality of cognition” (Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics 336–37). Planetary disruption is a human problem in the deepest and broadest sense because humans arose from the planet’s biosphere as one adapted biological species among others (E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature xiv) and, in the words of the author of the Gaia theory, “the first organism to use the energy of sunlight to harvest information” through the powerful tool of intelligence (Lovelock x), a tool that, with its myriad of achievements and applications, can turn against itself. In practical terms, planetary disruption being a human problem makes it—through the human (over)reach across the planet—a problem of and for each and every other knot in the planetary web of life, whether an organism, force, or phenomenon, but (currently) only humans have the means and the responsibility to repair the damage. In other words, climate change is a problem for humans to solve: the ultimate human problem. With the LotF boys representing either “the human condition” per se or “not always benign visions of human nature” (H. Bloom 8)—or indeed both—seemingly mutually exclusive polarities (mind-body, nature-nurture, civilization-savagery, etc.) feed into each other in ways that defy simplification.

Kate Soper is right to challenge the assumption behind the discourse of human unity with nature that the notion of interdependence inevitably leads to pro-environmental attitudes. Indeed, thinking ourselves different from or superior to the rest of nature doesn’t necessarily lead to maltreating it: all it does is help us justify the maltreatment if we choose to commit it (132). Neither is reminding ourselves of what we share with other animals more obviously persuasive as a reason for changing our patterns of relating with the rest of nature than insisting on their difference (175). However, it doesn’t take much to trigger biases in favor of the status quo , and Soper’s nuanced reasoning lends itself to overinterpretation that risks undermining any genuinely transformative action: after all, if it doesn’t really matter how we conceptualize our place in the world, then why change anything beyond perhaps our technologies or certain processes? And yet, since the worst of planetary disruption has coincided with global ascendancy of a cultural paradigm beholden to the man-nature dualism, sticking to it is far from a safe bet. Quite the opposite, in fact.

What helps to negotiate this complex terrain is ecocriticism, which I take to be a versatile set of tools capable of both illuminating and inspiring multiple interactions with and within the worlds we inhabit. Of ecocriticism’s several varieties, the one most relevant here is cognitive ecocriticism. The term itself was first proposed by Nancy Easterlin, who argued in 2010 that “cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are relevant to all areas of literary studies. Because human minds stand behind all human activity, including literary activity, knowledge of the mind is relevant to any literary account of the environment. Indeed, that environment and its representations cannot be apprehended via any mechanism other than the mind” (“Cognitive Ecocriticism” 257), and she developed this argument further in 2012 to emphasize that “literary works that explore the mind’s positive and troubled relationships with nonhuman nature importantly illuminate the conditions that shape human attitudes … toward the environment” ( A Biocultural Approach 93). According to a later overview, cognitive ecocriticism “incorporat[es] neuroscientific perspectives on mind and ecology,” and developments in this specialism (alongside those in affective ecocriticism) offer “encouraging prospects for the study of perception, emotion, and feeling within and outside environmental narratives” (Ryan 14). Lucy Zunshine, however, notes that, while cognitive ecocritics and other cognitive literary scholars draw on insights from cognitive science, they don’t work toward consilience with it and instead engage with a variety of paradigms and approaches, resulting in unexpected intersections and ground-breaking research (2–3). Certainly, bringing together a wide range of perspectives and resources is key for navigating the infinite complexity of the world. This essay’s aspiration to harness fruitful intersections and produce useful research is based on the assumption that because human cognition and storytelling are instrumental in both drivers of and solutions to the unfolding planetary emergency, then engaging with literary (and other creative) works in analyzing the idiosyncrasies of the human mind is both an opportunity and an obligation. Eminently fitted for articulating ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, paradoxes, and tensions, works of literature play an important role as we undertake and undergo moving through the world. Crucially, that role itself is often contradictory and paradoxical: “while literary narratives can certainly limit knowledge and reinforce outdated and even patently false beliefs, they can also challenge the beliefs of the literate population, even when generic structural conventions appear to serve the maintenance of existing ideas and values” (Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach 53). In these exceedingly contradictory and paradoxical times, we can’t do without literature.

Literary criticism partakes in this crucial work through its dual analytical and activist role. Taking this project further is increasingly relevant in the world of the Anthropocene, with its rising tensions at the conceptual and corporeal borders between the human and the non-human—or rather “more-than-human”—community of beings on which our existence depends (Abram 9). Through its embracing of multiple intersections and its appreciation for diversified perspectives, ecocriticism provides an important perspective on the planetary predicament that humankind is facing. Situated at the juncture of literary scholarship, environmental sciences, and cultural studies, ecocriticism’s objective is to interrogate the ways (a given) culture represents and constructs its environment and thus shapes the conditions that allow (that) culture to exist in the first place. Synergistically inter-, multi-, trans-, meta-, and cross-disciplinary, ecocriticism scrutinizes the variety of relationships that together weave the naturecultural web of meaning while contributing to the weaving process itself—very much like its objects of study.

In the past decade, much of the research into the human mind and behavior has been challenged as not universally applicable or even reliably replicable, with the methodologies of psychological science coming under internal and external attacks and concerns raised about trustworthiness of its findings, although there is little evidence that replicability in subfields of psychology is substantially lower than elsewhere in science (Lilienfeld and Waldman xiv). Intriguingly, some of the failures in accurate reporting on psychological research methods and findings seem to have been caused by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning (LeBel and John 78): apparently, cognitive biases don’t spare even those who may seem best equipped to study them. Nevertheless, samples of experimental participants have been shown to be massively biased, overwhelmingly drawn as they are from Western societies, which gave rise to dubbing the populations commonly used in psychological and behavioral experiments as “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) because in cross-cultural studies they tend to register at the extreme end of the distribution (Henrich xii-xiii). But in view of the fact that it’s the Western industrialized societies and the so-called Western lifestyle that have been responsible for the majority of environmental disruption in the modern era, findings from WEIRD studies remain relevant and provide valuable warnings for the future, as well as offer hope. After all, while at least some social capacities are universal among humans, their manifestations differ depending on particular circumstances (P. Bloom 352) and local cultural dispositions, such as group identities or social norms, can overrule the cognitive biases relevant to our environmental attitudes (Marshall 69). Patterns of behavior deemed inevitable on account of simplified visions of human nature are susceptible to change, one example being the variability of something as fundamental as reproduction across both time and culture (Clayton and Myers 8). Cultural shifts on a massive scale have historically happened, with the most recent one being the expansion of the Western worldview that overwhelmed alternative patterns of cognition and now dominates across the globe, particularly among the wealthy and the powerful (Lent 20): a cautionary tale that—perhaps paradoxically—confirms that other ways of seeing the world and interacting with it are possible and that points to the inherent potential for transformation that can be harnessed. For all their past flaws, and thanks to improved recent methodologies, psychological studies help inform the understanding of human nature as a dynamic phenomenon capable of adaptation.

Protagonists of LotF, English boys from (mostly) privileged backgrounds and thus heirs to a certain vision of human nature and social hierarchy, can certainly be described as WEIRD (in the mid-20th century incarnation). Indeed, Crawford explicitly identifies the only beast on the island as “the fascist group of English adolescent males who kill or attempt to kill outsiders” (51), Schoene-Harwood points out how the boys’ reinvention of their surroundings and own selves is “driven by the imperatives of a masculinity based on negative self-assertion” (71), and Singh emphasizes the “absence as presence” of the female parent in the “barren emotional landscape” of the novel (211). The in-group out-group mentality on display when the boys split into two opposing camps is exacerbated by the gender dynamic, in which nature itself replaces girls or women as the Other that the boys can assert themselves against (Schoene-Harwood 68). While Piggy’s aunt is repeatedly recalled as a link to a better world, the description of the sow-killing scene and the resulting defilement of the “maternal female” (Roy 177) amounts to a gang rape and represents hatred and fear of the human and nonhuman other (Ralph 408). Seen from the modern ecocritical perspective, LotF appears to be a study of the abuse of “Mother Earth” in the Anthropocene, as cognitive biases and cultural attributes fuel the ecocidal and speciesist—and thus ultimately self-harming—rampage across the island ecosystem without whose support the boys will not survive. Based as it is on a view of human nature as an unchanging phenomenon that, if not-necessarily God-given, is nevertheless a given, LotF as a diagnosis is as powerful as it is problematic. We don’t yet “know about people” as much as we need, and we have precious little time left to learn.

Golding denied conceiving LotF as a scientific experiment of sorts (Golding and Baker 137), but the novel does provide what could be described as an account of a fictional “natural experiment” on human behavior under duress, with its subjects representing a sample of the society that shaped them, set against a backdrop of a tropical island at once different from their typical environment and resonant with their perceptions of the world outside of “home” as instilled by cultural narratives of imperialism and colonization. It is true that, by confining his protagonists to a speck of land in the middle of the ocean, Golding applies a long-established literary device of a microcosm to examine human nature and human polity (Boyd 30), but there’s much more to his vision than such restricted reading (valuable though it is) allows. I believe that with its compact and fragile ecosystem, the unnamed island lends itself to interpretations that go beyond narrowly defined sociological concerns toward those that foreground ecological ones as they intersect and interact with lived experiences of being human. Whatever (or whoever) the “beast” haunting and hunting the boys on the island may be, what do the results of Golding’s experiment mean for the boys, for the island, and, by extension, for the entire human project?

Introducing the notion of the gene pool, that is, “the total genetic diversity found within a population or a species” (Rotimi), is apt here thanks to its fruitfully bringing the natural and the human (back) together. In a single species, there exists a range of traits, with some of them dominant at any given time. As the circumstances change and exert pressure on individuals and groups, over time different traits come to the fore, adjusting the overall genetic makeup of the species and its subsequent interactions with the environment. Applying this insight to the social and cultural sphere depicted in LotF, Ralph, Piggy, and Jack each represent a different set of personality traits: in E.M. Forster’s reading, Ralph is “sunny and decent, sensible, considerate .… He is democracy”; Piggy is “aware that the universe has not been created for his convenience …. As long as he survives there is some semblance of intelligence”; Jack “loves adventure, excitement, foraging in groups, orders when issued by himself, and … shedding blood …. He is dictatorship” (viii-ix). Each boy thus represents a certain constellation of attributes of human nature as mediated by culture. Depending on the changing social-environmental context interacting with the original distribution of these traits, over time some of them come to the fore as others fade into the background. We see this process in LotF when the original rules-based democratic makeup of the boys’ community gradually shifts toward a populist authoritarian one, as the clash of personal values under environmental stress leads to the originally dominant traits represented by Ralph and Piggy being challenged and then replaced by the ascending set of traits represented by Jack.

By revealing meaningful analogues between the two poles of the supposed man-nature dichotomy, this gene pool-based reading illuminates the novel’s portrayal of the human world in its intertwining with the natural world. Golding idealizes neither nature nor human nature (R. Wilson 10), let alone assert superiority of either, and indeed seems to recommend a “dual accountability to nature and culture” as a way of (re)gaining intimacy in the man-nature relationship (Hanafy 16–17). Whether his goal was to deconstruct the man-nature dichotomy, reinforce it, or merely bring attention to it, his most famous novel continues to provide insights into binary thinking. A powerful bias, cultural as much as cognitive, that only recognizes opposites and “furthers the disease of polarization and fundamentalism” (Stoknes 179), binary thinking leads to overemphasizing distinctions between, and even demonizing of, (perceived) social groups through the in-group out-group mentality (Marshall 33–35) and helps entrench the notion of the “environment” as “something surrounding us that is distinct and distanced from us” at the expense of fully comprehending the extent of human immersion in nature, thus prioritizing individualism over ecological identity (Stoknes 195–97). The way in which foregrounding and backgrounding of the human in relation to the natural in LotF oscillate and overlap anticipates a growing recognition of the precariousness of modern civilization within the geophysical system of planet Earth.

“I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you’re all British, aren’t you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean—”

“It was like that at first,” said Ralph, “before things—”

He stopped.

“We were together then—” (284)

It is understandable that, for Ralph, the breaking up of bonds between the boys, as companions if not always as friends, would be traumatic. Having seen their community gradually disintegrate and turn against itself, he begins to invest the beginning of their time on the island with an aura of unity and solidarity. Whether Ralph fully realizes it or not, he now has all the ingredients required to cook up a biblical story. In climate change denial, cultural narratives are employed to “deflect disturbing information and normalize a particular version of reality in which ‘everything is fine’” (Norgaard 207), but they can also be used to help one resign oneself to the inevitable, thus alleviating the discomfort of individual responsibility by surrendering to fate. Through resorting to cultural narratives, the events on the island (are made to) line up perfectly to imbue the whole affair with a culturally entrenched sense of meaning, the Edenic beginning of plenty and togetherness giving way to the infernal fall of murder and hatred as the supposedly inescapable consequence of the morally diseased nature of human beings. Ralph does not need to spell out any of that for Golding’s message (and indeed conviction) to leap out of the page.

From the island’s perspective, however, there was never any golden age of the boys’ time there. On the contrary, its ecosystem suffers damage from the outset, the boys’ passenger cabin smashing a scar into the jungle on arrival, foreshadowing the blazing obliteration on their leaving. Along the way, non-human sentient beings are unsustainably killed for human sustenance, and the island’s living tissues are burned to help humans communicate with other humans. In the ultimate instance of the “means-to-an-end” approach to the natural world, what proves necessary to attract attention of the passing cruiser that finally saves the boys from themselves is an infernal auto-da-fé of the entire island. That these actions are not specifically premeditated is immaterial, as they stem from an entrenched cognitive-cultural model that benefits the perceived interests of the civilized world at the expense of those of the natural world, the former destroying the latter even as the very physical existence of humans depends on saving the more-than-human web of life.

The boys’ failed attempts at creating an orderly—even constitutional—arrangement have been made much of, with Ralph and Jack, as chiefs of rival bands, interpreted as representing both the tragically polarized mid-twentieth century politics and the seemingly eternal civilizational need to find a rival (Boyd 34). In the way that some of the boys seem to be attracted to and placated by whatever has the aura of “something purposeful being done” (16), whether sounding the conch, gathering names, or electing Ralph chief at a whim, there is “a hint of irresponsibility” (Babb 8), which portends their subsequent struggling with the cognitive dissonance born of their illusion of control: a tendency to overestimate one’s personal influence over an outcome (Thompson 134), which is supported by the natureculture dichotomy (Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach 102). In a fleeting yet forceful scene, one of the younger boys cannot help but imagine himself exercising control over tiny sea creatures: “his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery” (80), which he relishes with fascination. Time after time, every character attempts to exercise power, only to see it prove illusory (Hanafy 12), demonstrating the potential of human-nature hyperseparation to instill a false sense of agency and autonomy (Plumwood 444). Illusions of mastering their environment can only be maintained within a limited timeframe—and indeed are repeatedly shattered—yet maintain their allure. Jack, the leader of choir boys-turned-hunters, gradually begins to resemble a populist politician that offers short-term comfort (meat and hunting as panem et circenses ) at the cost of long-term survival. Even Piggy and Ralph find his vision of “demented but partly secure society” that “hemmed in the terror and made it governable” irresistible (212–13). When confronted with the failure to secure rainstorm shelters, Jack, having just dispensed meat in his capacity as the self-proclaimed tribal chief, overrides rational concerns with a command to perform a grotesque dance ritual: momentary fun prevails over mundane chores. Short-termism of this kind seems to have emerged in a deep evolutionary past and remains one of the fundamental barriers to a meaningful long-term climate action (Stoknes 32). Ralph fails to challenge Jack’s fixation on immediate gratification, his ambiguous position of desisting from hunting but partaking in the feasting (Talwar 200) akin to those cognitive and behavioral inconsistencies that today often attract a charge of hypocrisy.

Human capacity for cooperation is often put forward as a foil for the out-of-control individualism promoted in the free market capitalism with its focus on the individual consumer as a supposedly rational independent actor. However detrimental such individualism can be, cooperation, as noted above, is in itself value-free and can be applied in ways both constructive and destructive. LotF offers multiple instances of the latter through its portrayal of atrocious consequences of ecophobia, that is, “aversion to and avoidance of the nonhuman other” (Ralph 401). While at the beginning the island resembles Eden, with its abundant fruit, clean water, and a climate inviting to go au naturel (Friedman 59), by the end it has turned into a “fiery hell” (Tiger 139) through the boys’ unsustainable activities propelled by their ecophobic attitudes and institutionalized through their power structures. In the way that they “savored the right of domination” (33) over the island and that their self-absorbed “fun and games” (282) wreaked havoc on its web of life, one notices a disturbing similarity to the cognitive and social dimension of our own accelerating environmental predicament. Early on, in starting a deadly fire, gorging on diarrhea-inducing fruit, and fouling their immediate surroundings (R. Wilson 49), the boys reveal their (self-)destructive capacities—also evident in their vocabulary of conquest and entitlement: “we’re explorers” (27), “This is real exploring” (29), “This belongs to us” (31), “All ours” (34)—that mark successive narrative milestones, from their penchant for pushing rocks off high slopes regardless of the damage to the landscape, to their lack of concern for the underprivileged (the youngest children), to the reckless killing of wildlife, to the indiscriminate use of fire in settling scores. As atomized and dispersed individuals, the boys would be much less likely to survive, let alone to inflict lasting damage on the ecosystem; it is their being “together” that enables them to bring it to the edge of collapse but also that, if the story went another way, could allow them to create a less ecophobic community capable of sustainable coexistence with other forms of life. In light of the latter possibility, their failure is all the more poignant.

LotF rejects the notion of the “noble savage” and accepts a grim belief somewhat akin to the doctrine of the original sin to expose “an ingrained and ineradicable flaw in human nature” that reveals itself in the protagonists’ degeneration into their most basic and therefore supposedly authentic selves (R. Wilson 46–48). With the ongoing reexamination of the role indigenous communities play in ensuring ecosystem health, the part assigned to “savages” in LotF brings to mind imperialist narratives of superiority and progress. It is one of those facets of the novel that allows it to continue generating a strong pushback.

Most recently, LotF featured in the bestselling nonfiction book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. According to Bregman, LotF has transcended its status as “just” a novel because “Golding’s take on human nature has also made it the veritable textbook on veneer theory” (24), that is, the notion that civilization is only skin-deep. LotF is said to represent one of the two dominant opposing views on human nature: the Hobbesian and the Rousseauan, where it is squarely in the former corner. Indeed, fictional castaway narratives tend to follow either Hobbes or Rousseau in featuring a violent state of anarchy or an idyllic state of nature, respectively (Christakis 26). Golding must have been aware of that well-attested opposition, not least because LotF provides a parodic rebuttal to a nineteenth-century adventure novel Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne, in which shipwrecked boys learn useful skills and knowledge through a “Rousseauistic” education (Singh 207), very much unlike Golding’s protagonists. For Bregman, who sees in LotF the kind of cynicism that inspires manipulative reality TV shows as well as aggression and dishonesty in real life, Golding embodies and perpetuates a negative, and thus self-defeating, view of human nature that is all the more pernicious precisely because it is fictional.

To counter the “make-believe” story of English boys shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, Bregman narrates what he repeatedly calls “the real Lord of the Flies ”: a true yet (until recently) obscure story of six boys from Tonga who became stranded in the 1960s on ‘Ata, an uninhabited island in the Pacific, where they thrived for over a year until rescued by a passing ship. This provides Bregman with one of the many examples for the case he makes in Humankind : that by nature “most people, deep down, are pretty decent” (2). However, the way he tells the story illustrates the process of cultural marginalization. The events are largely told through the eyes of the Australian sea captain who rescued the boys; they are described as Catholic boarding school pupils on the largest island of what was then a British protectorate; Bregman highlights that on ‘Ata they built themselves a badminton court; their Tongan background is barely mentioned (not least through westernizing their names); the role of their ancestral knowledge in surviving on the uninhabited island is brushed over; the only time their cultural heritage comes into focus is when Bergman mentions the ruins of a former native settlement whose population had been captured by slavers a century before. Bregman may have wanted to advance his argument for universal decency of humans, but in sidestepping the issue of native culture altogether he came under fire for applying a colonial lens to the story that would be better told by Tongans themselves (“Concerns over a tale of shipwrecked Tongans”). His “real” LotF turns out to be yet another selective narrative.

In the case of the “make-believe” castaways, the boys’ cultural heritage is clearly at play. LotF has been accused of offering a defense of colonialism as an enlightened rule by framing the boys’ reluctance to keep up appearances of a polite society and their attraction toward alternative social arrangements as a slow descent into a depraved condition that turns them into, “in the loaded and often-repeated word of the text, ‘savages’” (Hawlin 73). While the time the story is set in is not specified, the novel was written in the waning days of the British Empire, and some of the lingering imperial rhetoric is clear in Jack’s confident words: “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things” (53). The sense of superior cultural identity is palpable, which makes it all the more ironic that he who proclaims it is the one who brings it to the edge of collapse. Indeed, the hierarchical worldview that the boys seem to hold conceptualizes “savages” as a separate, non-human category—“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?” (122)—thus conveniently othering anything and anyone outside their own narrowly defined circle of supremacy.

But things could have gone very differently for either group of boys. What has been recognized by “self-stranded” communities such as research teams deployed to Antarctica, who are brought back after a prearranged time precisely to provide “a bulwark against Lord of the Flies –style anarchy” (Christakis 89), is the importance of timeframes. The young Tongans’ adventure is deemed a triumph only because of the timeframe that determined the perception of its outcome. Reportedly, the sole reason for their putting out to sea was boredom and longing for adventure, which they resolved by “borrowing” a boat from a fisherman they disliked (Bregman 30–31), a far cry from what the LotF boys went through as victims of war. Had the Tongans been found adrift days later, the whole affair would likely have been condemned as a foolish escapade by reckless teenagers. Luckily for the moral of the story, they were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and then rescued over a year later in peak condition, the island’s resources still plentiful enough to support their small and close-knit community. And by pure luck, too, as they seem not to have made any sustained effort to signal their location, unlike the LotF boys. But what if they continued on the island until all the easy pickings ran out? With a dwindling supply of food and other resources, without tools or medicines, lashed by the elements, how long it would take for tensions to escalate? Given the accidental nature of their rescue, is it not possible, indeed probable, that things might have gone on for too long not to have gone wrong? Contrary to the intended moral of the story, counterfactual thinking reveals that Bregman’s heart-warming conclusion rests on viewing the result in hindsight as inevitable and disregarding a range of alternatives. Such “outcome bias” leads to investing a coincidental outcome with undue significance, risking a skewed judgment of events and decisions after the fact (Kahneman 202–4).

Applying the same counterfactual thinking to the novel, had the boys succeeded in attracting a ship early on, while still keeping the fire going, having meetings, and building shelters, their story might have been presented as a triumph. Had they been rescued much later, there might have been a positive moral as well. The killing of the suckling piglets and their mother was a particularly horrific instance of hyperbolic discounting in action: a cognitive bias by which incurring costs now is disfavored over accepting far greater costs in the future (Marshall 66), such as foregoing an immediate feast versus starving due to a subsequent loss of sustainable food sources. Assuming that the island would not go up in flames, with Jack eventually running out of pigs to kill, the ensuing crisis could lead to his autocratic rule being overthrown and replaced with a more democratic arrangement. As a fiction writer, Golding could have crafted a very different narrative than the one he did, in which the boys are rescued in their darkest hour—reduced to stereotypical savagery, intent on murder, setting fire to their home—thus ensuring the whole affair serves as a disillusioning failure.

In the end, diverse fates of people who survived historical shipwrecks, with some descending into cannibalistic murder and others building mutually supportive communities (Christakis 31), confirm that both the “real” Lord of the Flies and the “make-believe” one are perfectly possible. And perhaps despite its reputation as “misanthropic and dystopic” (Ralph 406), the novel’s fictional gloom can brighten the real world: As E.M. Forster noted in 1962, “while certainly not a comforting book .… it may help a few grownups to be less complacent and more compassionate, to support Ralph, respect Piggy, control Jack, and lighten a little the darkness of man’s heart” (xii).

Having uttered the agonizing self-accusation invoked at the beginning of this essay, Simon is “howled down and struggles to find words to express his intuition of a flaw in human nature” (R. Wilson 24). As bad as that assembly went, it was nothing compared to what happened later on, with Simon’s role again misconstrued. As the feast presided over by Jack in his scheme to oust Ralph descends into a ritualized recreation of the rape-murder of the sow, Simon appears with news of the beast on the mountain being merely the body of a dead parachutist. For some, Simon’s life and death resemble those of Christ (Boyd 39), but I view his role here as the voice of reason or, in more specific terms, as a dissident or a whistleblower debunking a pernicious myth—born of a noxious combination of biases both cognitive and cultural—that animates a community’s self-destructive tendencies. What “us” turns out to be in response to Simon’s revelations is uncomfortably close to Ralph’s prediction, with the boys overcome by the herd instinct and collectively slaughtering what they take to be the “beast,” thus preserving their founding myth. If, as Chellappan points out, the ritualistic murder of the sow was “a release of the beast within” (6), then the murder of Simon was a way of protecting the beast, even if (deliberately or not) performed as the killing of it. Simon’s self-accusation comes back to haunt “us.”

What good’re you doing talking like that? … It was dark. There was that—that bloody dance. There was lightning and thunder and rain. We was scared! … P’raps he was only pretending— .… It was an accident .… Coming in the dark—he hadn’t no business crawling like that out of the dark. He was batty. He asked for it .… We got to forget this. We can’t do no good thinking about it …. We was on the outside. We never done nothing, we never seen nothing. (219–21)

We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke …. Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories .… Or we look but try to be hyper-rational about it .… Or we look but tell ourselves we are too busy to care .… Or we look but tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves .… Or maybe we do look—really look—but then, inevitably, we seem to forget .… We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right. (3–4)

Importantly, Piggy and (to a lesser extent) Ralph minimize or outright deny their involvement not because they do not feel guilty but because they do . As Norgaard observes of climate change information being too disturbing to absorb, “denial can—and I believe should—be understood as testament to our human capacity for empathy, compassion, and an underlying sense of moral imperative to respond, even as we fail to do so” (61). Indeed, given Jack’s premeditated intent to kill Ralph later in the story, one struggles to picture him in denial, painfully ruminating over his involvement in Simon’s murder.

Golding intended “the beast” to symbolize the human capacity for evil, and it is no coincidence that the boys’ ostensible descent into “savagery” is portrayed animalistically, with them being likened to dogs, snakes, apes, pigs, wolfs, cats, as well as animals and beasts more generically (Dickson 53–54). As the real-world barriers between humans and (other) animals are being gradually dismantled, “the human claims to superiority and dominion, not just distinctiveness, break down” (Christakis 283), lessening some of the presumed opprobrium associated with such comparisons, but, within the world of the novel, they still carry weight and, equally importantly, serve to center the beast as the force that permeates everything and everyone, rendering any success in resisting it fleeting at best and invariably futile. Thus, the man-nature dualism fueled by cognitive and cultural legacies must eventually collapse in on itself. As Ralph becomes prey (and indeed a beast) chased by the pack of two-legged apex predators, a brutal re-integration of humans into the non-human world is all but complete. The process is interrupted by the arrival of grownups, but conceivable alternative endings would bring it to completion.

In one, Jack succeeds in putting to grim use the stick “sharpened at both ends,” and the final image is that of Ralph’s skull impaled side by side with that of the sow as a hybrid human/animal demon-deity; in another, all inhabitants of the island, human and non-human, perish in the all-encompassing inferno, their differences and distinctions rendered meaningless by the great leveler; in yet another, the cruiser with the boys onboard is sunk (by enemy fire or a natural disaster), their lives cut short by forces that define human existence, whether acknowledged or not, thus confirming the omnipresence of the beast in its multiple guises.

“Grownups know things,” said Piggy. “They ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ’ud be all right—”

They wouldn’t set fire to the island. Or lose—

“They’d build a ship—”….

”They wouldn’t quarrel—”

”Or break my specs—”

”Or talk about a beast—”

“If only they could get a message to us,” cried Ralph desperately. “If only they could send us something grownup … a sign or something.” (126–27)

In their desperate attempt to retain—if not manufacture—belief in humanity, the boys (choose to) conveniently forget what brought them to the island, which makes the first sign that eventually “came down from the world of grown-ups” (130), that is, a dead parachutist whose horrifying countenance parallels that of the impaled head of the sow, that much more ominous. In addition to becoming one incarnation of the beast, the rotting corpse on the mountain represents the dark side of civilization (R. Wilson 50), and it provides a reminder of the destructive war still raging out there, costing not only countless human lives but also ecosystems; indeed, many lands must have been reduced to ashes as a direct result of the war effort, and just as easily as a dead body, the air battle on the horizon could have sent down smoldering plane debris, setting fire to the island quite apart from the boys’ own exploits.

Perhaps the most telling sign comes in the form of the naval officer and his “trim cruiser” at the closing of the novel. The inconvenient truth of that unlikely rescue is that the officer is himself a warrior and, most likely, a killer, and that the wider adult world the boys will now be whisked away to is in ruins not unlike the ruins they are leaving the island in—perhaps even worse than the society they created (Reiff 85). There is no escape from partaking in destruction and desolation; after all, onboard the cruiser, the officer will engage in “a maritime search-and-destroy mission identical to the island hunt” (Friedman 68), where environmental and humanitarian concerns will come distant second to military ones. This is made plain in his casual framing of the disaster he chanced upon: “Fun and games,” he says, grinning cheerfully: “What have you been doing? Having a war or something?” (282). However technically accurate he may be in ironically dismissing the relatively small scale of the destruction he is witnessing when compared to the mass death brought on by the nuclear war he is an agent of (Boyd 36), he fails to comprehend that right before his eyes entire worlds are being annihilated: the world of the island as a distinct knot in the web of life and the world of Ralph’s belief in humanity.

The last time we see Ralph, he weeps “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (284). There is a striking contradiction in this parting thought that may or may not have been intended by Golding: after all, if “man’s heart” were inherently dark, would true friendship even be possible? That final image of inconsolable grief over the human condition confirms LotF as an important contribution to the perennial investigation of what it means to be “us” within the world that creates us even as we create it in turn. But it also does something that perhaps only now—as the “burning wreckage of the island” (284) is fast becoming a lived reality for many of us—we can begin to fully appreciate. Whether defects or not, cognitive and cultural features of the species play a vital role in (the failure of) recognizing our dependence on and embeddedness in nature, underscoring Golding’s cautionary words about the need for self-control. Ralph’s grief on the point of being miraculously rescued offers a critical insight we need to internalize in the Anthropocene: no trim cruiser is coming to our own burning island. It’s only us, indeed.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Lies Wesseling and Louis van den Hengel for providing extensive feedback and guidance throughout, and to Przemysław Janikowski for helpful comments on the second section.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

1. Unless indicated otherwise, page numbers in parentheses refer to the 2006 edition of Lord of the Flies.

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Lord Of The Flies Human Nature Essay

Lord of the Flies is a novel that explores the dark side of human nature. The story follows a group of boys who are stranded on an island and must fend for themselves. As the boys struggle to survive, they quickly descend into savagery. The novel demonstrates that even in the most civilized of people, there is a potential for evil.

This evil can be unleashed when people are placed in difficult or dangerous situations. Lord of the Flies is a cautionary tale about the dangers of human nature. It shows that even in the best of us, there is a capacity for violence and cruelty. The novel is an important reminder that we must be careful not to let our darker impulses take over.

Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies depicts how human nature works when children are stranded on a remote island and exposed to danger. Golding utilizes items like the conch and the Beast to reflect our society politically and psychologically. The book demonstrates humanity’s sickness while also depicting it. Human nature is an inescapable part of life that, at times, may be used for evil.

In the novel, Lord of the Flies, human nature is a source of evil. The novel begins with a group of young boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island. They are forced to fend for themselves and create their own society. The boys elect a leader and establish rules in an attempt to maintain order. However, as time goes on, the boys begin to degenerate into savagery. They lose all sense of morality and start to kill animals and humans indiscriminately. The only thing that matters to them is satisfying their own desires.

Golding shows that human nature is a source of evil through the characters in the novel. Jack is one of the main perpetrators of violence on the island. He represents the savagery that is within all of us. He is also willing to do whatever it takes to maintain power. Ralph is the opposite of Jack. He represents order and civilization. However, even Ralph is not immune to the effects of human nature. He becomes just as savage as the others towards the end of the novel.

Golding’s novel shows that human nature is a complex thing. It can be a source of both good and evil. Human nature is something that we cannot avoid and it will always be a part of us. The novel demonstrates that even the most civilized among us are capable of great violence and brutality. We must be careful not to let our darker impulses take control.

It’s in one’s nature to do whatever it takes to live. Evil grows when one strives to survive. The Jack and his hunters were the most horrific of all. The first pig killed was the first indication of evil. They celebrated the deaths and became bloodthirsty for hunting, as did the hunters and little boys after Jack on the island.

They no longer cared about being rescued and living a “civilized” life. All they wanted was to kill and to have fun. Simon showed the most good. He was the one that found the dead pilot and he also realized that the beast was not real.

The boys thought that he was crazy when he tried to tell them about the beast. Simon tried to warn them about Jack and his hunters but they did not listen. In conclusion, Lord of the Flies shows the evil of human nature when put in tough situations such as being stranded on an island with no adult supervision.

When we are children, it is our parents’ responsibility to instill good values and ethics in us. Evil cannot be entirely hidden away. The kids appreciated the lack of restrictions and grown-ups. Their freedom on the island immediately turned into a nightmare, and some individuals perished as a result of it. Civilisation is not too distant from barbarism, and everyone has their own form of darkness within them.

Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Golding in 1954. The book is about a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. The boys start off acting like proper little gentlemen, but as time goes on they begin to act more and more like savages.

The novel has many themes, but one of the most important is that it shows the dark side of human nature. Golding believed that there is a evil side to all of us, even children. This is what he tries to show in his novel.

One of the ways he does this is by showing how quickly the boys descend into savagery. At first they are content to just goof off and have fun, but as time goes on they start to form gangs, get violent, and even hunt and kill animals.

The novel also shows how the boys’ relationships with each other change over time. At first they are all friends, but soon they start to fight and hurt each other. In the end, most of them are afraid of each other.

Golding believed that human nature is essentially evil. He thought that we are all born with a dark side, and that it is only through society and civilization that we learn to suppress it.

Lord of the Flies is a classic novel that has been read by millions of people. It is still relevant today because it speaks to the dark side of human nature. It is a reminder that we all have the potential for evil, and that we need to be careful not to let it take over.

The idea that human nature is “fundamental” is popular in the academic community. It implies that, while other species are driven by instinct or emotion, humans have free will and can reason. Our ability to think distinguishes us from all other creatures, and it comes from God; we are all born with good and evil natural inclinations, depending on our personalities, decisions, and self-conscience to shape ourselves into good or bad people.

The novel “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding is a perfect example that explores the topic of human nature, and its potential for evil. In this story, a group of young boys are stranded on an uninhabited island, and must fend for themselves. With no adult supervision, the boys eventually descend into savagery, as their primal instincts take over. The novel highlights the dark side of human nature, and how even the most innocent people can be capable of great evil.

One of the main themes in “Lord of the Flies” is the loss of innocence. The boys in the story start out as innocent schoolboys, but after being stranded on the island, they quickly lose their innocence. They become violent and savage, and even kill one of their own. The loss of innocence is a major theme in the novel, as it shows how quickly people can descend into savagery.

Another theme in “Lord of the Flies” is the idea of good vs. evil. The boys in the story are constantly at odds with each other, as they battle for control of the island. The conflict between good and evil is a major theme in the novel, as it explores the dark side of human nature.

The novel “Lord of the Flies” is a classic story that explores the dark side of human nature. The themes of loss of innocence and good vs. evil are major themes in the novel, and are still relevant today.

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How did Oklahoma become the location of a real-life Lord of the Flies?

Seventy years ago, a landmark psychological study that has been described as a real life Lord of the Flies took place in an Oklahoma state park. But although the Robbers Cave Experiment, like the novel, focused on a bunch of schoolboys, it offered a very different perspective on human nature.

KGOU thanks all the contributors to this How Curious episode: Marty Gooden, Gina Perry, and Ovis "Smut" Smith; plus Mauricio Carvallo, Nyk Daniels, and Krischan Dietmaier; and the The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron, which supplied all of the featured audio archive material and photos taken during the experiment.

How Curious is a KGOU Public Radio production. Rachel Hopkin is its host and producer, the Managing Editor is Logan Layden, and David Graey composed the theme music.

The How Curious team loves getting listeners’ suggestions for How Curious subjects, so you have an Oklahoma-related question or idea, please send it in via [email protected].

How Curious Episode Transcript - How did Oklahoma become the location of a real-life Lord of the Flies?

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Pessimistic Views on Human Nature in Lord of the Flies

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Introduction

The fragmentation of unity: divide and barbarism.

The Descent into Savagery: Jack's Transformation

Stripped of humanity: the apex of cruelty, conclusion: the dark core of human nature.

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Against gossip & scandal, independent media network, global stories from local perspective, factual culture news, reimagining chaos: jack thorne’s vision for a timeless ‘lord of the flies’.

Jake Yancey is a product of NYU Tisch and is passionate about engaging in substantial conversation and enriching, multi-faceted dialogue in politics, tv production, and culture.  Jake is excited to work at The Hollywood Insider because he believes that Film and Journalism are humanity’s first line of defense against the chaos of an uninformed public sector and so spends his time scouting for relevant stories everywhere. Jake, driven by a strong work ethic and love for people, plans on eventually working at the studios to help develop the stories which have had such a lasting impact on him. 

Sep 26, 2024

Table of Contents

From Page to Screen: Why Film Breathes New Life into Golding’s Classic

Since its publication in 1954, William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ has become a pillar of English literature, renowned for its unflinching exploration of the human condition under duress. Its portrayal of a group of boys stranded on a deserted island, descending into savagery as their fragile social structures collapse, resonates with readers of all generations. However, Golding’s novel isn’t just bound to the written word. Over the years, ‘Lord of the Flies’ has undergone several cinematic interpretations, each striving to capture the visceral energy and psychological tension of the novel.

Film adaptations offer an unparalleled medium to bring the chaos and isolation of the island to life. The visual elements of cinema provide a tangible representation of the novel’s themes—innocence lost, the fragility of civilization, and the primal instincts that lie just beneath the surface of human nature. While Golding’s prose dives into the psychological landscapes of his characters, film can externalize these inner tensions, using sight and sound to immerse audiences in the boys’ gradual descent into anarchy. Jack Thorne’s upcoming film adaptation of ‘Lord of the Flies’, set in the hauntingly beautiful backdrop of Malaysia, promises to reinvigorate Golding’s story for a new generation, adding layers of modernity to its timeless exploration of survival and society.

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Jack Thorne’s Mastery: A Modern Adaptation of Survival and Society

As a playwright and screenwriter, Jack Thorne has developed a reputation for his nuanced approach to storytelling, blending the personal with the political in works like His Dark Materials and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child . Thorne’s adaptation of ‘Lord of the Flies’ promises to channel his ability to find humanity in even the most dire of situations, while retaining the raw brutality that defines Golding’s work. The choice to film in Malaysia suggests that this new adaptation will not only embrace the exotic wilderness but also bring a fresh, global perspective to the story, making it relevant to today’s audiences.

Thorne’s adaptation also benefits from the current cultural climate, which feels more primed than ever for Golding’s exploration of societal breakdown. In a world increasingly characterized by polarization, tribalism, and rapid shifts in technology, ‘Lord of the Flies’ speaks to modern anxieties about the erosion of social order. Thorne’s approach to the material is likely to delve deep into these themes, positioning the film as more than just a period piece, but rather as a reflection of contemporary fears.

This adaptation also appears to be one of the most ambitious yet, with Hans Zimmer composing the score—his first collaboration with Thorne. Zimmer’s involvement hints at a sonic landscape that will likely evoke the tension, chaos, and isolation felt by the boys. In Zimmer’s hands, the score will undoubtedly amplify the psychological intensity, merging music and narrative to escalate the sense of impending doom.

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Cinematic Depth: How the Visual Medium Amplifies ‘Lord of the Flies’ Psychological Tension

Film, as a medium, offers the advantage of transforming Golding’s abstract psychological horror into a tangible sensory experience . Thorne’s version, like previous adaptations, has the challenge of visually articulating the gradual collapse of the boys’ moral compasses. Unlike a novel, where internal thoughts can be expressed through narration or text, film must rely on visual storytelling—body language, facial expressions, the use of space, and the environment itself—to evoke the boys’ mental unraveling.

Take, for example, Harry Hook’s 1990 adaptation of ‘Lord of the Flies’. While not as critically acclaimed as Peter Brook’s earlier 1963 version, Hook’s film uses its tropical setting to great effect, with the lushness of the jungle evolving from a paradise into a claustrophobic prison. As the boys descend into savagery, the island becomes a character in its own right—an untamed force of nature mirroring the chaos within the boys themselves. Thorne’s choice of Malaysia as the film’s setting could serve a similar purpose, utilizing the dense, almost suffocating landscapes to heighten the story’s psychological tension.

Moreover, film offers the opportunity to manipulate time and perspective. Quick cuts, slow-motion sequences, and close-ups can all be used to emphasize the growing hysteria, confusion, and paranoia among the boys. The build-up to key moments, such as Simon’s murder or the hunt for Ralph, can be extended through pacing and editing, drawing out the suspense and ensuring that these scenes hit with maximum emotional impact. Thorne, known for his narrative subtlety, will likely bring a layered, multifaceted approach to these sequences, ensuring that the film retains the novel’s psychological complexity while also embracing the visceral power of cinema.

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Translating Chaos: Thorne’s Vision for a Gritty, Timeless Tale in the Age of Modern Cinema

In adapting ‘Lord of the Flies’ for the screen in 2024, Thorne is tasked with preserving the novel’s timeless themes while updating its presentation for contemporary audiences. His previous work suggests he will strike a delicate balance between staying true to Golding’s original text and bringing a fresh perspective that resonates in today’s world. The question of how civilization can so easily disintegrate is perhaps even more relevant now than it was when Golding first wrote the book. In a world rife with political division, climate crises, and social unrest, Thorne’s adaptation can serve as a mirror to the real-life chaos that often feels just beyond our control.

In this modern context, the story of ‘Lord of the Flies’ takes on new shades of meaning. With technology at the center of today’s societal structures, Thorne’s adaptation has the opportunity to explore how these same systems might exacerbate division and chaos if left unchecked. The isolation of the boys on the island becomes symbolic not just of physical separation, but of a disconnect from the moral and social frameworks that typically govern society. Thorne’s screenplay may delve into how these frameworks—like our own systems of governance and law—are far more fragile than we’d like to believe, echoing the political upheavals and societal fractures of the 21st century.

Thorne’s collaboration with Hans Zimmer suggests a grittier, more intense approach to the material. Zimmer’s compositions, often characterized by their use of deep, resonant sounds and minimalistic tension-building techniques, will likely add a sense of urgency and dread to the proceedings. Where earlier adaptations of ‘ Lord of the Flies ’ relied more on the eerie quiet of the island setting, Zimmer’s score will likely become a driving force in the film, adding to the sense of inescapable doom.

Thorne’s decision to place the film in a contemporary setting ensures that ‘Lord of the Flies’ retains its relevance in an age where questions about leadership, morality, and survival are more pressing than ever. While earlier adaptations, like Hook’s, maintained a more traditional, period-specific approach, Thorne’s film might decide to update the aesthetics and dialogue to reflect the concerns and challenges faced by Gen Z-ers in the world today. A modern interpretation could possibly be appealing not only to longtime fans of the book but also to younger audiences unfamiliar with Golding’s work. 

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Hopeful Outlook: A Classic Retold

Jack Thorne’s upcoming adaptation of ‘Lord of the Flies’ promises to be a bold reimagining of William Golding’s timeless novel . By leaning into the advantages of the film medium—its visual storytelling, its ability to externalize psychological tension, and the use of music to enhance emotional depth—Thorne can offer audiences a fresh, dynamic interpretation of Golding’s themes. In an age where societal stability often feels precarious, Thorne’s film may resonate deeply with viewers who see echoes of the boys’ descent into chaos in the world around them. With Hans Zimmer’s score adding emotional weight and the stunning Malaysian setting providing a rich, atmospheric backdrop, this adaptation is poised to bring ‘Lord of the Flies’ into the modern era in a way that is both timeless and timely .

By Jake Yancey

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Worldview — William Golding’s Worldview in the ‘Lord of The Flies’

William Golding’s Worldview in The 'Lord of The Flies'

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Published: Aug 30, 2022

Words: 1993 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

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