Golding wrote Lord of the Flies following World War II and his experiences during the early days of the Cold War. The novel is an allegory regarding the tenuous construct of human civilization, as well as man’s capacity for savagery and brutal violence, and the battled between civilization and nature.
Lord of the Flies takes place on a remote, unidentified island during an unspecified war. The characters of the novel are a group of young English boys, who are stranded upon the island without adult supervision after a plane crash. Although the boys strive to maintain order and to increase their chances of being rescued from the island, their community gradually devolves into mob...