Investigating Dystopia in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Abstract

The General conclusion William Golding is one of the pioneer writers of the twentieth century who excelled at portraying and reflecting the reality of the world in a perfect literary template. Golding the person used to believe in the perfectibility of social man and he used to have an idealistic view towards society and people. However, after the war and the hard times he witnessed, he got affected deeply and his way of thinking changed. At that point, Golding the writer was born and he started his journey through the literary world by his first successful book Lord of the Flies, a book that grew out of his experiences in World War II. Lord of the flies is one of the most remarkable novels and Golding's noble prize masterpiece that was published in 1954. Golding by his book tried to tell a story in which the characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life and the main idea of that book is that everyone has evil in his heart. Lord of the flies is a moral allegory about how goodness almost always fails to withstand evil. The novel is about a group of British schoolboys who are taken far from war and who are shot down by enemies and stranded on a deserted island. At first, it is all good and everything is all right. The island is perfect, full of food and fresh water, and the boys build shelters and light a signal fire in the hopes that they will be seen and rescued. Then the things start to go wrong. They start fighting and some of them become overwhelmed with blood and hunting. Other boys are killed for no reason and the rest they set fire on the whole island just to kill another. They would have succeeded, but a military ship arrives and they were all rescued. Through his allegorical novel, the author tries to send a moral message about the human nature and the evil essence of people. Golding believes that human beings are evil Rahmouni 59 by nature and their innate is dark; as a result, civilization, rules, and orders are just walls that are put to prevent this evil and darkness from destroying the world. Moreover, he as a writer worked on releasing his views towards humanity and the human nature through his literary work especially his novel Lord of the flies. Through lord of the flies, Golding explores and explains his main ideas and viewpoints towards the imperfection of human beings through a very intelligent way that squeezes the minds. Golding uses lord of the flies to bridge the gap between perfection and imperfection, goodness and evil, order and disorder, and simply bridged the gap between utopia and dystopia. He did so through presenting his novel as a utopian one at the beginning and then he had passed his story smoothly to dystopia through the utopia he had presented at first. As a result; our thesis works on proving that this novel Lord of the flies is a dystopian novel not a utopian one even though it contains the elements of the utopia. Through providing a clear understanding and a historical background about the dystopia as well as the utopia and through analyzing the utopian elements that Golding explores throughout the novel. The thesis answers the previously stated research question and proves that Lord of the flies is a dystopian novel not a utopian novel.