Book summary
William Gerald Golding was an English playwright, poet and author. Although Lord of the Flies is his best known book, Golding wrote and published twelve other books of fiction during his lifetime. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for his literary contributions and was knighted in 1988.
The book starts with a couple of British boys crash-lands on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after evacuation from a nuclear war. Ralph, a twelve-year-old, meets Piggy, a fat boy with asthma on his way out of the wreckage. The two come upon a conch shell, which Ralph blows in order to alert the other survivors: Jack, who is ambitious, and his friends; Simon, who has epilepsy, and some younger children.
The conch is used as a tool to determine who can speak, and Ralph becomes the leader of their new democratic society. Also, a beast that the children were terrified of is believed to exist on the island. While Ralph explains that no beast exists, Jack wants to find and destroy it. As a result of this disagreement, the boys are eventually split into two rival factions, each led by a different leader, Jack, and Ralph.
After becoming violent and savage, Jack's group ends up killing Piggy and Simon and then setting the island on fire. The passing Naval officer who saw the fire saves Ralph from Jack and his team. At the end of the book, the officer expresses disappointment with the boys' behavior.
"The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream."
"The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise."
"It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there."
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