The Owner of Flies is Relevant Forever

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William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, sole intent is to grapple with the fundamental question as to whether human nature is invariably evil. The stage he sets to go about answering this is just that– a stage where anyone can slip into the roles of Jack, Piggy, or Ralph. But, perhaps that was exactly Golding’s objective: to not give dimension to his characters. He did not set out to develop characters that possess the level of fame in J.

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D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. If that were the case, Golding would have failed. Rather, Golding wanted to have his readers be aware that every human can hurt another being; it is simply the matter of doing or not doing when the circumstances offer the opportunity to do so without seemingly lawful consequences. To create a diverse character would convolute this message Golding was trying to get across. It was the right decision on his part.

Certainly, there are a plethora of classic novels that do have both good messages and a developed cast of characters, but the way Golding decided to execute the message in Lord of the Flies calls for him to stereotype them to represent different aspects of society – Piggy the minority, Jack and Ralph, the leaders, and Simon, the peacemaker.

Additionally, by turning the boys into savages at the end of the novel, humans’ instinct emerges beyond their superego, appearing to be resolved. Karl is not wrong when he says that the question of human nature’s goodness is unresolvable, but he is wrong to think that Golding attempted to find “The Final Solution.

” This question does not offer persuadeGoingGolding's right answer. What Golding has simply done is create an example to persuede the reader to lean more towards humans’ tendency to be evil.

Furthermore, Karl’s thesis that the idea of a Golding novel is superior to the performance itself” generalizes and denounces Golding’s work. By going into all of Golding’s works with the assumption that Golding executions will not match the abstract idea sets Karl up for disappointment even before he has opened the book, which in turn, creates a biased opinion. As Szilagyi also wrongly concludes in his “Critical Commentary: Another View” “the adventure in these books never really takes off.” To expect Lord of the Flies to offer a scathing adventure story that other classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Treasure Island would dismantle Golding’s work.

Golding may have lacked literary elements such as character development that attributes to many other classic novels, but what Golding succeeded in was developing a question that will endure for centuries, a topic broad enough to interpret and reinterpret, assess, and reassess over and over making Lord of the Flies forever relevant.