> Lord of the Flies is plainly allegorical, at least in part. As I (and another poster) noted elsewhere on here, it's made very clear at the end. If you're not going to ask those questions, you may as well not read it.

This is missing the point, which is not that you can't see meaning and that it's very likely you can guess at the authors intended meaning, but that writing with any kind of certainty about the intent of specific phrases or choices is quickly descending into an experiment in writing fiction.

> But you kept it in the book. All kinds of things sprung to mind and didn't make it in, surely.

Sometimes I kept it in the book because it sprung to mind and fit and there were no reasons to remove it. Sometimes I kept it in the book because it mattered to the plot. Sometimes because it's a fun little joke for my own enjoyment and nobody elses. Sometimes it just fit the pacing but served no other purpose. Sometimes it just sounds cool (in fact, I have a whole file of little fragments I intend to drop into future books when I find somewhere they fit for no other reason than that they sound cool as one-liners or isolated paragraphs). Sometimes because I enjoyed writing it and it's my damn book and I'll put it there if I want to whether or not it serves a purpose.

Maybe, sometime, I'll decide to put in some symbolism (likely not, I have no interest in chasing interpretations of symbolism when reading; I find it trite and conceited and wouldn't want to inflict it on readers with similar views on it as myself, which are ultimately the only readers I particularly care about).

I'm not Golding, and I don't aspire to write work that'll get picked apart in literary reviews. It has no interest to me to even try to hone my skills to Golding's level (and no illusions I'd stand much chance of achieving it). It's a hobby to me, not a life work.

You can well argue that it's different with a writer who appears to have invested a great deal more effort and skill in mastering the craft, and succeeded very well. But the point remains that unless he has spoken to it you don't know whether specific scenes were subject to agonising over phrasing or just sounded right at the time.

Some writers spend ages writing and rewriting. Some churn out a draft and fixes broken sentences and are done. Some spend ages rewriting but only the parts that are important to the plot. Without knowing the specific writers process, and how it was applied for that book, whether or not a given phrase is in there by chance or because it mattered deeply to the author is guesswork.

You can certainly analyse why it works to you as a reader. I have no objections to that. What I object to is the notion that you can say with much certainty why an author placed a given sentence there.

> "there's a whole section about killing pigs because the characters were hungry" would represent poor reading, period.

Would it? It worked, clearly. What the intent of putting it there originally was is entirely irrelevant to your subsequent experience of it. It's quite possible, maybe even likely, that your assumptions about Golding's intent are correct. The point remains that absent any statements from him it still remains a guess. And it's still not very interesting as long as it remains a guess (if Golding has spoken about it, that would be interesting to me). What is interesting is why it works for you as a reader.

I don't think anyone here has suggested you can't (or shouldn't) pick apart why a work is effective for you as a reader.

That is indeed well worth understanding if you want to write, not least because there's often a vast chasm between how writers think they'll be interpreted and how readers will take what they've written and twist it into something unrecognisable and infer all kinds of intent that was never there. You don't need to understand - or try - to avoid that when writing fiction.

On the contrary, writing works that leave lots open to interpretation is a great way of being taken way more seriously than you intended to be.

But understanding what is likely to achieve certain goals or appeal to certain types of readers certainly matters.

And it also matters to those authors, because they certainly do exist, who do have messages they want to convey. Golding certainly seems to want to hit the reader over the head with messages in a very unsubtle way, and so it's not at all unlikely you're right to read things into his choices, but it's still guesswork.

For my part, I have no intent of imparting any deeper message in my own books. I'm just playing with things I find fun, and I know that to be the case for a lot of other writers too, including many substantially better than I am.