Deconstructing Binaries in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Abstract

Lord of the Flies is a novel that was written in a context that makes it limited to a narrow pool of interpretations. Being written after the war makes it perceived as an allegory of the political situation of the world. Hence, its meanings are often taken from the same pool. This thesis takes the task of pointing at the possibility of other understanding of the novel’s events. It attempts to make the events understood within the novel itself and neglect the historical and political context. The main question raised in this research is “How fragile is the structure of the novel when put under the scope of Deconstruction?” The thesis approaches the question with the assumption that no work has an absolute meaning, and that the reader is the axis of the structure of any novel, the reader is the one who assigns meaning to what the author has written. In order to approach the question and conduct the investigation, the dissertation carries a descriptive study of the novel as it focuses on its themes; especially the conflicting ones, in order to draw more attention to the complications of the novel and to open a window to a vast sea of interpretations of the novel. Moreover, it also focuses on the symbols and how they are seen differently by characters of the novel and through the events. The novel is constructed on conflicting themes such as civilization and savagery, reason and passion, good and evil…etc. By bridging the gap between the opposites, each theme gets deprived from its preassigned meaning and the structure of the novel gets compromised and the reader gets the role of getting his own interpretation of the novel