by metadope | 2025-12-21 21:19:15+00:00
I first read this book when I was about the same age as the main characters. I saw the movie not long after that. I was deeply moved (disturbed) by the drama and the outcome of the fictional story. Even though the story did not arrive at a happy ending where a hero emerges both victorious and virtuous, even though the negative outcomes (for characters I cared about) were personally distressing to me, my main takeaway was a new sense of a harsh reality, a terrible truth that was being presented to me, which accurately reflected my actual contemporaneous experiences in the real world, in my life.

True story: when I was nine years old, I was sent, for the first time in my life, to a place known in the midwest US as "summer camp". Most of the other kids there were older than me. I learned that canoes are very hard to get into. I learned that ponds had horseflies and mosquitoes and leeches. I learned that once I'd climbed the tower of the high-dive my legs would turn to jelly and I would struggle to make it to the end and jump off anyway.

In a weird twist from home, someone had stashed into my suitcase a large can of spray deodorant. I was only nine; did I stink already? I had no idea why I had it, but it was a great toy that I put to use immediately. Run up to a boy, spray some deodorant into their face, run away, cackling.

I delighted in this trick often enough that I soon had an angry mob chasing me-- up and down the trails of the camp, many older boys clamoring for my scalp, revenge. Eventually, I ran out of road and was cornered, as a significant crowd formed an intimidating semi-circle around me, closing in.

Kids were still cursing me as they rubbed sting from their eyes. The atmosphere was ugly. It got quiet. I'd really messed up. I felt fear, real like the highdive.

Just when I thought I'd had it, one boy stepped forward and turned and faced the crowd: he actually held out a hand like a traffic cop. To this day, I don't know what compelled him to put himself between me and all those older, bigger boys. He wasn't that much older than me. But he talked them down, got them to let go of their justified displeasure with me. One of the older boys snatched the can of deodorant out of my hand. A lot of fingers were wagged in my face. But nobody hurt me. Nobody stuck me with a stick like a pig.

I never saw the hero again. I've never used deodorant since.

We are exposed to a lot of fairy tales when we are young. Some of them are Grimm, but many are illusory misrepresentations of a fantasy world that the adults in our lives wish they could provide for us.

Buried beneath the surface is the always unspoken reality, which often entails a trail through a wilderness to a gingerbread house on a gumdrop mountain where a witch is waiting to boil us alive.

Lord Of The Flies is grim but true. On the playground, in small groups, when the adults are absent, children become a hierarchy of peer pressure and social eruptions, like spots on the face of a Head Boy at whatever English prep school. The savagery is there, the power struggles, the bully and the rebel, the shrinking violets and the blooming idiots, they're all real, and they often have a life-long after-affect on the lives of those who came together, on that day, when that happened.

> Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.

I don't know who you cite as an authority here-- has been shown to be? By whom? 'Overly pessimistic' in situ, I await illumination...

I don't see Lord Of The Flies as overly pessimistic. I think it is a masterpiece of literature, providing insightful and frightful expressive splashes of sound, fury and color; allegorical visions of what childhood really is like for modern and post-modern Western civilization. Highly recommended.