Occasionally someone brings up Lord of the Flies as some sort of real-life allegory of man's inhumanity to man, when it's nothing like that at all.
First, Lord of the Flies is fiction.
Not only is it fiction, it was based off of a real incident where a group of boys did get stranded on an island for a while until they were rescued. In the real life version, they all banded together, took care of the injured, and were in relatively good health when help finally arrived.
Just a follow-up: apparently I got the order of events wrong. The Tonga shipwreck occurred after Lord of the Flies was published. What the book was based off of was (and a rebuttal to) The Coral Island, another fictional novel written in the 1800s.
My brain must have combined the real-life Tonga incident and confused/combined it with the fictional Coral Island incident.
I gotta say this post generated a lot of insightful replies. I appreciate people letting me know about the factual inaccuracy of my original post. Also a thank you to those who replied with their own personal experiences.
Many American kids in public school read this book when growing up and it conditions people to assume the worst in people.
Many pointed out not everyone would be a saint (I know this as well), but that the real outcome would be more in the middle. I agree with this viewpoint.
@zalasur Uh, Lord of the Flies was written in 1954 and the Tongans were shipwrecked in 1965. Unless Golding had time travel, Lord of the Flies could not have been based on the Tongan story.
The Tongan story is a great rebuttal to Lord of the Flies, though!
@ducky Yeah someone pointed that out already. I was thinking that it was based off of a real-life incident, and it was, but I pulled up the wrong incident.
This is always an interesting and relevant contrast, but for the record Lord of the Flies was published over a decade before the Tongan teenagers were shipwrecked.
Absolutely agree that the book is often misinterpreted and incorrectly applied. It most certainly is not any kind of serious analysis of human behavior under shipwreck conditions.
Hot take, Golding’s book is best read as a critique of western civilization than of people in some “state of nature.” The boys are shipwrecked while fleeing Britain during a (possibly nuclear) war. The Beast is a fighter pilot shot down in that war. They’re rescued by the crew of a warship that tuts the boys’ lack of civility while the ship is prosecuting a global war of destruction.
The boys aren’t barbaric because they lack civilization, but because their civilization is barbaric.
LoTF was written well before the Tongan incident. 1954 to 1965.
It was written in part as a reaction to the civilized behaviour of the kids in the 1857 The Coral Island, which used to be required reading before LoTF's dystopian take overwhelmed it.
@deirdrebeth aw dang I didn't even catch that. I may have been thinking of the earlier incident but pulled up the Tonga one because of a misremembering
@deirdrebeth Ah shoot, so the Coral Island "incident" a fictional novel as well. Hm, I wonder what I was thinking of when I posted my original post. I probably just got the order of events wrong.
@zalasur However, having been a Boy Scout leader and observed similar situations (without the death and destruction), I always thought the book version was easily within the realm of reason. 🤔
@zalasur Let me be clear - I'm aware that the original events were radically different from the book events.
I just want to ask - did you know that it was not a documentary?
@zalasur You were so outraged that someone found an analogy to human history in the book that I thought you thought you thought the author had purposely retold the original story incorrectly.
Personally, I am experiencing a real air alert in Kyiv right now, and I think the author's analogy is more than appropriate.
@MarkoHelgenko I'm sorry to hear about your situation. Stay safe.
But to your original point, I was making the observation that people repeat the story over and over again, even teaching it to children as though it were some sort of given that this is just what happens.
As someone else mentioned, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
@zalasur Thank you for understanding, I too can be wrong due to permanent stress.
As for prophecies - there are a lot of them and some of them are bound to come true in one interpretation or another. This one came true. The book is not so well known that it is necessary to build a conspiracy on its basis. Rather, the increase in violence can be attributed to Tom and Jerry cartoons))
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