In Lord of the Flies for a large section of the book, it
is unclear who the protagonist of the book is. When the book begins it has two
main characters that emerge from the jungle first. “The beach between the palm
terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left
the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity; and
always, almost visible, was the heat.” It seems that these two boys would
naturally become the protagonists, but later Simon and Jack also seem fit for
the role of protagonist. Later in the book when Simon and Piggy die, it seems
like Ralph is the protagonist and Jack is the antagonist, but I do not entirely
agree with that. I think the book was not a story about good guys and bad guys,
I think it was more about human morality and how we act without authority or
threat of punishment. The protagonist was the entire group and the antagonist
was the group’s slow decay.
One thing in this book that is different from most other
survival books about this book is that there are never any threats to the
groups lives except for themselves. Most of the time in books like this there
is a famine or a hurricane, something that threatens the wellbeing of the
characters in the book but in Lord of the Flies there is never anything like
that. They even make up their own threat in their imaginations in the book. “He
still says he saw the beastie. It came and went away again an’ came back and
wanted to eat him” I believe the reason William Golding did not add
something like that, is so the book would show how a group would decay on its
own without authority. I think that the group probably would have remained more
united if there had been a threat. They would have had a common enemy so they
would not have become enemies of each other.
I think that the overall theme of this book is the
importance of authority and rules. When people learn that there is nothing
stopping them from doing whatever they want, the entire idea of remaining
civilized is ignored and replaced with greed and a grab for power. On the
island when they attempt to make rules, it fails because they have no way to
enforce the rules. Everyone on the island has an even amount of power, so no
one is in a position to enforce rules.
