0 Sir William Golding

Lord of the Flies William Golding

List all the rules in your life that you object to or reject

Total freedom? • Advantages and disadvantages • Does it exist?

Sir William Golding • 1911-1993

William Golding •Born in Cornwall, England •Educated at Oxford •His father, Alec Golding was a

Science Master and a socialist •His mother, Mildred, supported the campaigns for female suffrage

William Golding • Listed his hobbies as

•thinking •Classical Greek •sailing •Archeology • Married Bilinda Pluck (1939) and was the father of two • English and philosophy teacher

Golding: War Service • Served in the Royal Navy in WWII • Involved in the pursuit and sinking of German

battleship, Bismarck • Participated in the Normandy D-Day invasion, commanded a battleship/destroyer • “I began to see what people are capable of doing…Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.” ~ Golding

Golding’s Literary Contributions

• Lord of the Flies ~ 1954

• previously rejected by 21 publishers • The Inheritors ~ 1955 • Pincher Martin ~ 1956 • Free Fall ~ 1959 • Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 • “his books illuminate the human condition”

• Knighted by the Queen in 1988

Accepting Nobel from His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden in 1983

Notes on Golding • Often writes in allegorical fiction • Allegory: characters and settings

represent moral concepts, symbolize human existence • The novel is an ironic response to Ballantyne’s Coral Island • Boys also stranded, optimistic view of mid-19th century England

Others on Golding • “Golding’s view is pessimistic: human nature is

inherently violent, which reflects the post-war and post-Hitler years.” • “In this book, as in few others at the present time, are findings of psychoanalysts of all schools, anthropologists, social psychologists and philosophical historians mobilized into an attack upon the central problem of modern thought: the nature of the human personality and the reflection of the personality on society.” (Epstein)

Nature of Man • With Lord of the Flies, “the theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature “ (Golding)

• Hobbes

• “…continual fear, and danger of violent death;and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short…” • Men need a common power, “reduce… by plurality of voices unto one will…”

• Locke

• …all men are naturally in a state of total freedom…” • Civil society, people place power into legislative hands for “lives, liberties and estates…”

• Rossueau

• The Social Contract: …”each individual surrenders all his rights without reservation…” • “freedom…is obedience to the will of all.”