Lord of the Flies was written in the decade following WW2, at the beginning of the Cold War, when the world lived under a real threat of nuclear war. The United States had forced the surrender of Japan in 1945 through the use of two atomic bombs, which compelled the Soviet Union to develop their own bombs and leading to them officially becoming a nuclear state in 1949. The tense time of ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence that ensued between the two superpowers, the Western Bloc, led by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union and its Communist Party, is replicated in the novel.

An allegorical novel, Lord of the Flies conveys many of its main ideas and themes through symbolic characters and objects. When a plane carrying a group of British school boys is shot down in the Pacific Ocean, the surviving boys find refuge on a deserted island and commence fending for themselves without adult supervision, the plane’s pilot having been killed in the crash. At first, a sense of order and rule is collectively agreed upon, with the establishment of a leader, Ralph, and the maintenance of a fire to signal ships passing by who could rescue them. However, many of the smaller boys soon grow tired of this work and turn to play, while others, spurred on by their growing hunger, and led by Jack, turn their attention to hunting the island’s pigs. The boys align themselves behind either Ralph or Jack, who war against each other for influence over the entire group and, eventually, order breaks down and is replaced with intergroup mistrust and paranoia and the escalating desire to destroy the ‘other’. This is in like manner to the way in which respective nations sided either with the Western or Eastern Blocs which led to proxy wars such as the Korean War (when North Korea invaded South Korea from 1950 to 1953 and the United States supported South Korea while the Soviet Union and China supported North Korea).

Golding was influenced in the writing of his text from having served in the Royal Navy and taking part in the sinking of a German battleship, the Bismarck, in 1941. During this time, Golding witnessed, and was strongly impacted by, the capacity for humans to cause pain and destruction, no matter which side of the war they were on. In an essay published in 1965, Golding wrote: ‘I began to see what people were capable of doing’. Golding explores ideas of human nature as savage and unforgiving and demonstrates through otherwise innocent boys the capacity that all humans possess to carry out immoral actions of torture and killing. The pig’s head that Jack mounts on a stick, which is referred to in the text as the Lord of the Flies, symbolises this idea.

Initially titled Strangers from Within, the text was rejected by at least seven publishers and described as ‘rubbish and dull’ by the first editor of the publishing house who would eventually publish it, Faber and Faber, when it had undergone changes to the text and title. It is now considered a modern classic and studied globally in English-speaking schools. Lord of the Flies has been adapted into three films, in 1963, 1975 and 1990, as well as to the stage in 1996 and radio in 2013, and has been referenced in literature and music.