Sir William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning Lord of the Flies (1953) has become an obligatory stop on the journey of any surveyor of the published English novel in the second half of the twentieth century. During an atomic war, a plane carrying a group of young English schoolchildren is shot down and the group finds themselves abandoned on a Pacific island. The boys, without elders, first try to organize themselves by setting rules and calling assemblies using a conch shell. Their leader at this point is Ralph, symbolizing good, aided by an obese and asthmatic Piggy, symbolizing practical common sense. But the group slowly regresses into savagery led by hot-blooded choirmaster Jack Merridew, symbolizing evil. What follows is a wave of murders perpetrated by Jack and his hunters who have created a reign of terror and are working on the psychosis of fear. Just as Ralph is about to be killed by Jack, a naval officer arrives on a rescue ship and escorts the boys back to civilization. However, the Edenic island is on fire and in this realistic novel, Golding symbolically shows the fall of man; democracy is forced to bow to dictatorship; evil wins at the expense of good; and civilization loses to barbarism. Lord of the Flies is in fact a demonstration, in laboratory conditions, of the forms assumed by human behavior once the constraints of civilization are lifted. It is for a very specific purpose that Golding lands his characters on an uninhabited and uninhabited island. This island is far from civilization, which prevents humans from doing what they would naturally like to do. “Man”, as Rousseau said, “is born free but is everywhere chained” (Le Contrat Social, 1762. Web. N.pag.).These... middle of paper ......attack on the problem central to modern thought: the nature of human personality and society” (250).Primary References:Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Chennai: Oxford University Press. 1999. Secondary Print: Epstein, EL “Notes on Lord of the Flies”. New York: Capricorn Books, 1959. 249-55. Print.Cox, CB “Lord of the Flies”. Critical Quarterly. Summer, 1960.112-17. Print.Nelson, William.The Lord of the Flies by William Golding: A Sourcebook. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. Print. Rosenfield, Claire. "Short Men: A Psychological Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies." » Literature and psychology. 11 (fall 1961). 93-101. Print. Stem, James. “English schoolchildren in the jungle”. New York Times Book Review. October 23, 1955. 38. Print.Web:Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.The Social Contract. 1762. the canvas. N.pag. February 4 2014.