During an atomic war, an aircraft carrying a group of about thirty pre-adolescent boys crashes on an inhabited coral island in the Pacific. The crew has been killed, and the boys are left on their own. They begin to collect themselves into a society of food gatherers under their elected chief, Ralph. A routine of duties is arranged and, at first, the boys live peacefully. Soon, however, differences arise as to their priorities. The smaller children lose interest in their tasks, the older boys want to spend more time hunting than carrying out more routine duties such as stoking the fire and building shelters. A rumor spreads that a "beast" is lurking in the forest and the children have nightmares. Jack, promising to ful

Golding's characters are also used to portray sharply differing points of view on the nature of evil, and the means of placating this powerful force. For Piggy, there is no such thing as evil, it is just people behaving irrationally. For Jack, evil resides outside humanity and must be placated by various forms of sacrifice, and for Simon, "Evil expresses itself in the words of the Lord of the Flies: evil is inside humanity."

Bewildered and frightened, the children yearn for a sign from the adult world, but the sign that is sent is fraught with meaning, possessing a symbolic power which persists throughout the novel. The dead parachutist himself is a scapegoat, a victim of the war which rages as the adults' madness increases on a scale minutely reflected by the boys on the island. "In his essay 'Crabbed Youth and Age', Golding refers to the millions of young men who were slaughtered during the First World War and 'the pure and blameless, the eternally sacrificed'". The dead parachutist is also invested with some of this eternal quality, and yet in this novel, the children are given the chance to externalize their apprehension of evil. It is the parachutists rotting presence which allows the boys to ignore Simon's suggestion, "What I mean is...maybe it's only us."

This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack started to protest but the clamour changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and his attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart.

Just as these boys tried to find inner peace and utopia on this island, which in appearance can be deceiving, the same is desired from all individuals. The only problem lies here: there is no such place, because even when found, this utopia begins to twist into a repulsive mirror image, where there is nothing left there that could remotely be considered utopian.

That Lord of the Flies does move us forward is something that few reader would deny. It is as fine an adventure story as many published since the war, and yet Golding's ability to employ language which both provides narrative impetus and also evokes profounder, more theological, implications is demonstrated immediately: 'Taking their cue from the innocent Johnny, they sat down on the fallen palm tree and waited' (Golding, 1954, p. 19). The novel is spare, deliberate in its intentions, and certainly Golding himself has little hesitation in referring to it as a 'fable'.

It is only when things start to lose order that they seek help from an adult, in asking themselves the question 'what would an adult do now?' Jack and his hunters are the first to ask themselves this que

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2073
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)