Lord of the Flies

It's funny how much of a book you can forget when you read it in high school. You also fail to realize the didactic nature of Young Adolescent literature--clearly Golding was commenting on the power-repression dynamic between adult/child, civilization/barbarianism, and man/beast. All I can remember about reading the book was the horror and darkness it invoked. A Freudian analysis would work well here: the conch shell would serve well as the phallus. Also, the fact that the boys ran around the island naked with spears and they stabbed things. The whole murder of the suckling sow (incidentally, the only real mention of a female in the whole book--does that speak to the civilizing nature of women? and how a gang of boys can quickly smite it out?) becomes a rape scene with a gang of boys plunging their spears into her and Roger boasting that he proudly shoved his spear "Right up her ass!" Then impaling her head on a stick. Could they possibly have used the work "ram" or "jam" or "plunge" one more time? And the whole Freudian obsession with sexual urges turns into savage war play with the boys and they fight the superior forces of nature. The castration comes in when the conch shell is smashed and Ralph is exiled. There also seems to be a place for a Foucaultian/Althusser approach--human desire for a system. Althusser claimed that if all ideologies and systems and institutions were stripped away, humans would cease to exists--so, the first thing the boys are compelled to do on the island is establish a system "because rules are the only thing we've got" (which miserably fails because there are no adults. But this begs the question: does the system truly work anywhere? Don't we have similar acts of violence in our "civilized, adult-regulated world? Where does this sense of "rules=safety" come from?) Then you have the panopticon of Foucault as a means of self-regulation and as a facilitator of the "us-them" mentality. Ralph and Jack vacillate in their subject-object positions leaving the power position in constant flux, so that the boys have no stability or system and rarely know on which side they belong. There is also the constant remarks on "eyes": the boys' eyes, the pig's eyes. This carries out the idea of panopticon-being watched and always watching. At the beginning, Ralph's eyes had a mildness that "proclaimed no devil," and he is the only one who remains "mild" throughout the book. I am also interested in the Biblical idea here that the eyes are mirrors into the soul or a lamp of the body. I read a commentary in which Golding was quoted as saying "The theme [of Lord of the Flies] is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." Here I offer my Christian reading of the book. I do think it remarks on the degradation and depravity of man. I further agree the with implications that government and systems cannot instill a sense of rightness and morality in the darkness and evil of the human heart. Rather such systems magnify and amplify the lack and void in humans, and their inability to maintain anything good and pure in and of themselves. Ralph especially ached for the stability of a system to maintain order and decency and was most shaken by the occurrences on the island: "He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet." So he was crying out the most for a Savior. But the book does not offer any hope at the end, or any real salvation. I also read that Beelzebub translates roughly to "Lord of the Flies." Which shows the devil inside the hearts of the boys? I'm not sure what to make of Simon and his death? Is he supposed to be a Christ-figure of some kind? Is he offering a sort of salvation to Ralph? Then the paratrooper who is dragged around the island by his parachute? What is that supposed to be?