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A nuclear war has engulfed the world. Groups of boys from various schools in Britain are being
evacuated.
En route to their destination, their aeroplane is shot down and the boys find themselves crashed on a
tropical island, with no adults to supervise them.
THE ATOMIC AGE
Lord of the Flies was first published in the early 1950s when the world was recovering from the
devastation of World War II. The horror of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini was still on everyone's mind.
At the same time, a significant event had recently happened -- the detonation of two atom bombs over
Japan. The people of the world were transfixed by the devastation.
And then, in 1949, Russia revealed that it too had the atom bomb. The world suddenly had two
superpowers threatening everyone with a nuclear holocaust.
William Golding started writing Lord of the Flies soon after this sequence of events.
It was taken for granted that a nuclear war would soon erupt. One prediction for this event was 1964 --
the theme of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach.
Indeed, the fear of the atom bomb was clearly revealed in a series of movies released during the early
1950s.
In the remake of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, America attempts unsuccessfully to destroy the
Martian invaders through the use of a nuclear weapon.
In Them, ants mutate into giants through contact with radiation and threaten all humanity.
Tarantula has a similar plot while in The Incredible Shrinking Man -- arguably the best
movie of this genre -- the hero shrinks to infinity after accidentally passing through a nuclear cloud while
at sea on a yacht.
These were the fears which were gripping the imagination at the time when William Golding was writing
Lord of the Flies.
The story is set in the very near future, at a time when new but strange aircraft travelled the skies.
In the plot, the next world war has indeed happened and the boys have had to be evacuated because of
the nuclear threat to Britain.
It is easy to conjure up yet another Hitler but in this case it's in the shape of the tyrant, Jack. Golding
shows what would happen within a small and closed community if such a tyrant were to succeed.
Have you looked at the questions in the right column?
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TEST YOURSELF!
Read the left column and then answer the following questions:
Piggy shook his head, put on his flashing glasses and looked down at Ralph. "Didn't you hear what
the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They're all dead."
- Why does Piggy mention the atom bomb? (2)
[Need help?]
Piggy is in fact arguing the point that no-one will ever rescue them. Everyone back in Britain, he says, will
have been killed in a nuclear attack. He and Ralph are therefore doomed to stay forever on this island.
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- Where was their passenger plane taking them? How do you know? (4)
[Need help?]
The novel makes no mention of their destination but back in the 1950s, when Lord of the Flies
was written, it was taken for granted that all British children would have to be evacuated to Australia in
case of a nuclear war.
Such a destination makes sense in this novel because the boys crashed onto an island in the south seas,
which is nearer Australia than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere. It would be logical to presume,
therefore, that they were en route to Australia.
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"We was attacked!" The fat boy shook his head. "When we was coming down I looked through one
of them windows. I saw the other part of the plane. There were flames coming out of it."
- The novel is set in the future. The passenger plane in which the boys were riding was therefore an
imaginery vehicle. What features make it different from modern jetliners? (4)
[Need help?]
Aeroplanes have always been single entities with the pilot up front and separated from the passengers
by a simple wall with a door joining the two compartments. Very modern passenger planes have two or
even three decks of passengers but still in a unitary framework.
Golding's futuristic plane, however, would appear to have been constructed in two parts -- something like
an articulated vehicle? -- with the pilot in one part and a separate "passenger tube".
Piggy says he was able to see "the other part of the plane" flying away in flames after having
separated itself from the passenger tube.
Because there is no example of such an aeroplane in existence, one has to guess at what the author had
in mind.
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"And this is what the tube done."
"What happened to it?" Ralph asked. "Where's it got to now?"
"That storm dragged it out to sea. It wasn't half dangerous with all them tree trunks falling. There must
have been some kids still in it."
- Explain how the boys arrived on the island. What is the meaning of the "passenger tube" which
scarred the island? (4)
[Need help?]
The boys were evacuated from Britain during the threat of nuclear war. The aeroplane which was flying
them to safety was shot at and the boys were able to see the pilot's section flying away in flames.
There appears, however, to have been a "passenger tube" which was jettisoned, presumably
dropped earthwards by parachute and then crashed onto the island, creating a great scar through the
forest.
The boys -- at least those who survived the crash -- scrambled out onto the island. The tube was then
blown out to sea during a storm.
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- If all the children were in the "passenger tube", why did they all become scattered after the
crash -- and why did so few of them appear afterwards to know one another? (4)
[Need help?]
The opening scene from this book is very vague -- indeed, almost surreal.
For example, the boys crashed during the night and a massive thunderstorm erupted soon after the crash.
The story starts, however, some time in mid-morning.
Was it the following day? Have several days gone by? Certainly enough time has passed for the fruit to
have given Piggy diarrhea. How long does that take?
Nevertheless, there is no sign of children anywhere. When they eventually get called together by the
sound of the conch, none of them appears to know the other -- apart from Jack and his choirboys.
How does one explain such a situation?
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"Where's the man with the megaphone?"
- Who is the man with the megaphone? (2)
[Need help?]
The man with the megaphone was on board the plane with the boys, directing them and probably helping
with the evacuation when their plane was shot down.
Notice that, despite this being a futuristic novel, the author cannot think further than a
"megaphone".
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[Need help?]
The man with the megaphone was presumably killed when the plane crashed. Perhaps he was standing
giving instructions when the passenger tube hit the island, whereas the boys had all been strapped in.
Piggy does, of course, speculate that many children might have been caught in the passenger tube --
either dead or injured -- and were taken out to sea when the passenger tube was blown away in the
storm.
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Technology advances so rapidly that Science Fiction movies are notorious for becoming out of date
rapidly. Indeed, a Sci-Fi movie that is more than a decade old is often quite laughable.
- To what extent is this true for Lord of the Flies? (4)
[Need help?]
Lord of the Flies is not, of course, genuine Sci-Fi.
The author has simply set his novel sometime in the near future because he needs to have a reason for
all the boys being wrecked together. An evacuation to Australia during World War III would have given
him that reason.
The book is also not focussed on future technology but rather on the human psyche, and that isn't
something which changes very much. Indeed, human behaviour hasn't changed significantly over the last
few thousand years. It is only the technology that has changed.
Nevertheless, the story does start with the author presenting a futuristic technology -- and here the novel
has indeed become questionable.
Luckily Golding keeps descriptions of the aircraft to the minimum and leaves the rest to our imagination.
Because of this, the novel is still as fresh as the day in which it was written.
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