I have just reread Lord of the Flies after many years. I was wondering if it’s correect to read it as a satire of Plato’s Republic. I haven’t come across it linked with Plato’s Republic in that way online or anywhere else.
Glad to make your acquaintance, Octagon.
Frankly, I would prefer not to reread Lord of the Flies again at all. The first time was brutal enough. But Plato? Maybe.
I will be lurking to read what others have to say though.
You can read it that way if you choose, but that wasn’t what Golding had in mind, as far as I know. It’s more mundane than that - an inversion of and response to a particular kind of Boy’s Own adventure novel. In this case, specifically, Ballantyne’s Robinsonade A Coral Island. And also based on Golding’s own experiences as a teacher at a boy’s school.
Thanks Mr Dibble. For some reason I had never been fully satisfied with the novel being simply a satire of Ballantyne’s A Coral Island . It just seemed too simplistic a view, and I guess was prepared to read more into it than was actually there.
Oh, no, I’m not saying it’s just a parody of ACI. Golding clearly had deep messages about society and morality to convey. But I think primarily through the lens of having been a grammar school master, not a rumination on one of the Classics. I guess I’m trying to say it’s more a personal reflection for Golding.
That clarifies things. Thanks.
Welcome to the board, Octagon. The General Questions category is for questions which have a factual answer, which this one really doesn’t. But as it happens, we also have a category dedicated to the discussion of literature and other arts, Cafe Society. I’ll just move this over there for you.
If anything, it’s the opposite.
Read through the lens of the Republic, LotF would seem to support those ideas, not satirize them. Socrates (through Plato) would argue that the situation with the boys is what happens when a society forms without the influence of a Philosopher King.
Heck, it fits almost perfectly. He’d say that the ‘Ship of State’ crashed, the navigator died, and there were none left but the quarreling sailors who, themselves, are incapable of forming a working city-state.
Thanks Johnny Bravo. That makes a lot of sense.
I read it quite a few years ago; but I remember thinking that assuming that the imagined behavior of a group of boys who’d been raised in that sort of school and culture could reasonably be expected to apply to humanity as a whole, or even to all children in that age group, was kind of absurd.
It seemed to be taught in schools as if that extrapolation’s perfectly reasonable, though. Anybody know whether that’s been significantly challenged?
I’d say it was sorta challenged when the exact situation in question occurred. Challenged and handily refuted.
Hah! And that was even also an all-male group from a boarding school from a similar culture. Thanks for the link!
Article implies that didn’t get it challenged in the literary-criticism sense, however.
Not everyone, not all the time, that’s not how cautionary tales work. I think there were two main points. The first is that this can happen even to well-brought-up British boys because there is a darkness in many people that civilizing influences or even rational self-interest can’t overcome. The second was a metaphor for world events, with individual children standing in for countries – the leaders, the bullies, the vulnerable little-uns who can’t stand alone, and so on. That’s tied in with the irony of the ending – the military ship has rescued the boys, but who’s going to rescue the military from their ultimate fate?
As for that (poorly-written) story about the six boys, the comparison in circumstances is not very close. Six boys where were friends before they got marooned, vs. 50 or more boys of varying ages, many of whom didn’t know any of the others at the beginning of the story. The social forces would have been very different.
Hence the “sorta”