Lord of the Flies - a ramble

[tracymort]

When I did this at GCSE I couldn't help think all the symbolism was a load of rubbish and that Golding just wrote a story without thinking about what the conch meant etc. However to keep the teacher happy I spieled off the usual what the examiners want to hear stuff (why i think GCSE's are a waste of time anyway!). Later I discussed this with DP and he thought the same and he reckoned he read something about an interview with Golding where he said that he didn't write the book thinking of all the symbolism in it. Anyone know anything about this?

[incitatus]

No but I went through the same process. All the questions said something like "why is the boys behaviour shocking" and the truthfull answer is it isnt shocking at all- happens every breaktime. Problem is the questions were written by a bunch of ancient queens with a gilded image of childhood.

[bernardo]

I think that probably most books by most authors are the same - any symbolism or hidden meaning is invented post-facto by English teachers as an excuse to torture countless generations of innocent schoolchildren. It is for this reason that Shakespeare should have been strangled at birth.

[LeMarchand]

I agree that most of the stuff you have to write to pass your exams is a lot of rot. Did Shakespeare really sit there thinking, "Verily, I must use a subplot to contrast the struggles of the main story"? I wonder if in a few hundred years some poor sods will be poring over Stephen King books noting the symbolism etc..

[jenstar]

Yeah, I remember being told that Macbeth uses a dual time-scheme. No it doesn't, he just screwed up the sequence of events. But the worst was having to pick out deep meanings in Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, which is clearly just a shaggy dog story anyway. I mean, Coleridge practically admits it himself - some weird bloke, probably drunk, accosts a stranger at a wedding reception and blathers on about slimy things and shooting albatross and playing dice with skeletons, or whatever it was... he's obviously just talking a load of rot, isn't he?

[Kit]

Absolutely agree that most exam questions (and indeed most of what we were required to read) seemed a load of total tripe at the time. BUT how much harder my brain had to work! Couldn't just rattle off the obvious - it took a lot of effort to concoct the sort of answers they seemed to want.
Now, the question is, is it actually a clever ploy by the examiner to get kids' brains ticking - or do they REALLY believe it? What a scary thought that is.

[IndieSinger]

Oh God I remember Lord of the Flies. "I can't on account of my assthmarrrr". Grr. I was glad when they smashed Piggy's glasses. Anyway, were you taught that it was all a mirror image of the Bible? We were. The island was the Garden of Eden and the kids were Adam and Eve and blah blah *snore*. If I hadn't have been made to process every syllable of the text, I would have enjoyed it.

Ben's English Literature teacher, circa 1998: Now please write an analytical essay on why you think the word "and" was used on page 186, line 29. What do you think this suggests about the boys' eating habits? How does the word "and" imply the boys' second favourite colour? What does the word tell you about one of the boy's mother's cousin's dog's previous owner's (who mistreated it) occupation when he was 17?

[Sceptic]

Or you could just let your teachers off the hook, and accept in good faith what Golding himself said about LotF: "The theme 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. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?"

[jjf2003]

You can all say what you like. Lord of the Flies is one of the best books I've ever read and people who don't like it just don't understand what it's all about.

[incitatus]

All I can say is for gods sake read more books. overrated, unsurprising, pedestrian tripe. The only shock in it was that he managed to spin it out so long, (face it, its a short story at most) and the use of language is strictly tabloid.

[jjf2003]

I stand by my word. I've read hundreds of books and LOTF remains one of my favourites. Inc, you have your opinion and I have mine, but do not tell me to read more books. You do not know what kind of education I have.

[marine02]

No offence but I would have to disagree; I also studied this at school and I thought that the symbolism was clear and easy to interpret even for a 15 year old as I was at the time. I definitely think it was intentional by Golding. But the point , about how its open to interpretation whether all the meanings read into texts in general were intended by the author, is a good one: there are so many conflicting ways of reading what a text 'means', they can't all have been intended by the author.

[Breakingdawn]

My teacher said Golding wrote the Lord of the Flies as a response to The Coral Island. He thought that bơk wasn't correct.