Context: Post-War Anxieties
Golding and the Second World War
William Golding served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He commanded a rocket-launching ship on D-Day and witnessed the psychological collapse of ordinary men in extreme conditions. These experiences destroyed any lingering belief he had in human goodness. He later wrote: ‘I began to see what people were capable of doing’. This personal disillusionment is the engine of Lord of the Flies (1954) — a novel that insists civilisation is a thin veneer, and that savagery lives inside every human being, including children.
Golding was also a schoolteacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. He observed how quickly groups of boys could descend into cruelty when left unsupervised. The novel draws directly on these observations: the boys on the island are not fictional abstractions but reflections of real behaviour Golding witnessed in classrooms and playgrounds.
Golding’s wartime service — D-Day, and observing schoolboys’ behaviour — convinced him that evil is innate in human nature, not caused by society. This belief drives every chapter of Lord of the Flies.
Cold War Anxieties and the Nuclear Backdrop
The novel is set during an unspecified nuclear war. In Chapter 1, Piggy refers to ‘the atom bomb’ and says that ‘they’re all dead’, meaning the adults. The boys’ plane was evacuating them from England when it was shot down. The Cold War backdrop is crucial: in the 1950s, nuclear annihilation felt like a genuine possibility. Golding places children — symbols of innocence — into a world that adults have already destroyed through exactly the kind of violence the boys will replicate on the island.
The dead parachutist who lands on the mountain in Chapter 6, mistaken for ‘the beast’, is a literal remnant of the adult war above. His presence connects the boys’ descent into savagery with the civilised world’s descent into nuclear conflict. Golding’s point is devastating: the adults are no better than the children. The naval officer who ‘rescues’ them at the end arrives on a warship, about to participate in the very same violence.
The naval officer is ‘moved and a little embarrassed’ by the boys’ savagery, then turns to face his own warship — a cruiser armed with weapons of mass destruction. Golding forces the reader to see that the officer has no moral authority. The ‘rescue’ is an illusion: the boys are simply being returned to a world that is itself at war.
Subverting The Coral Island
Lord of the Flies is a deliberate response to R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), a Victorian adventure novel in which three boys — Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin — are stranded on a tropical island and thrive through courage, teamwork, and Christian morality. Golding borrows the names Ralph and Jack but reverses the outcome entirely. Where Ballantyne’s boys conquer nature and remain civilised, Golding’s boys destroy each other.
Ballantyne’s novel reflects Victorian confidence in British superiority and the civilising mission of the Empire. Golding — writing after two world wars, the Holocaust, and the invention of the atomic bomb — found this optimism absurd. Ralph calls the island ‘like in a book’ in Chapter 2, and the other boys at once shout the titles they know — ‘Treasure Island… Coral Island’. This optimism is quickly destroyed.
Golding deliberately uses the names Ralph and Jack from The Coral Island to set up expectations of a cheerful adventure — then systematically destroys them. Where Ballantyne’s boys stay civilised, Golding’s descend into murder, showing that Victorian optimism about human nature was a dangerous fantasy.
Original Sin and the Nature of Evil
Golding was deeply influenced by the Christian concept of original sin — the idea that humans are born with an innate capacity for evil. The island echoes the Garden of Eden: a beautiful, bountiful paradise that the boys corrupt through moral failure. Simon’s encounter with the Lord of the Flies in Chapter 8 functions as a temptation scene, where the beast tells him: ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ The beast is not external; it is inside every boy.
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good and that society corrupts them (the noble savage theory). Golding’s novel is a direct rejection of this idea. By placing boys in nature without adult society, he tests Rousseau’s theory — and it fails spectacularly. Without civilisation’s constraints, the boys descend into tribal violence. Golding sides with Thomas Hobbes, who argued that without authority, life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.