On Lord of the Flies

This is an engaging, deeply Freudian novel about the human spirit. In short, a number of British schoolboys are marooned on a deserted island in the South Pacific. It starts all good and democratic, but quickly devolves into anarchic chaos following a falling-out between two of the most strong-headed children. It seems to me that Jack is meant to represent Freud’s Id—the instinctual attitudes of humans. More than any other factor, we see the boy’s lose all ability to manage what Freud calls the death drive (although Eros does not appear so prominently—we may say that it manifests itself in Ralph to some extent, but it’s unclear). Ralph is a representative of Freud’s Ego—the capacity to think and manage between the Id and Super-Ego. Finally, Piggy is representative of Freud’s Super-Ego—seeking out clarity and reason in the pursuit of higher goals.

This book pits itself fairly explicitly against Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage.” Instead, Golding argues that savagery is fundamentally destructive, and is therefore our original sin.

One major problem within the work is that Golding plays into old tropes going back to the 16th century. He inadvertently argues that those who are removed from human civilization regress psychologically and become savages (hence the enormous stigma in the 17th through 20th centuries of “going native). I say this is inadvertent because Golding is trying to say that we are ALL inherently savage, and yet it is only in arriving on the island that the boys’ world is shattered. Admittedly, adults are also destructive—the officers who find the boys are fighting a war against an unnamed enemy, but it seems that Golding has created a situation where the Ego and Super-Ego triumph over the Id in the adult world, whereas the reverse takes place in the children’s world. If it takes utter isolation for the Id to manifest itself, then what is it allows the Ego and Super-Ego to triumph (which it does, against Golding’s own implication, in the adult world).

I don’t have any answers, but I do have a lot of questions and I intend on continuing to mull them over.