To Ban or Not To Ban
A thematic essay on William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Written December 2010
William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is highly controversial in today’s society in many ways. Lord of the Flies offers a chilling and terrifying view of a situation where a group of boys are stranded on an island together and forced to survive without adults and their authority. Their civilized ways slowly digress into savagery as the instinct for survival takes over the need for order. The reader can only watch helplessly as this group of boys loses their childhood and innocence to instinct, cruelty, and even murder. This realistic situation was designed to express Golding’s theory that “man is inherently evil,” especially when there is no authority or law to suppress it. Ironically, despite the excess of violence in the novel, Golding’s work won the Nobel Peace Prize for literature. Golding’s winning of this prestigious award is one of the controversial subjects over this book. Other debates over the book include interpretations of symbolism, quality of the ending, the writing style Golding used, and how long the boys were actually stranded on the island. However, one of the fieriest disputes about Lord of the Flies is its appropriateness for use in schools, including its accessibility to children and young adults.
