A blend of personal trauma and real-world tragedy created the conditions for William Golding's famously pessimistic novel to emerge. War trauma, personal suffering, nuclear anxiety, and disillusionment with civilization shaped one of the most disturbing novels of the twentieth century.
Lord of the Flies is not a happy book. The novel offers a distinctly negative perspective on human nature, telling the story of a group of boys who descend into depravity after being stranded on a deserted island.
Unsurprisingly, its author William Golding did not have a rosy outlook on life. Ultimately, a combination of historical tragedy, personal struggles, and frustration with an optimistic children’s book led him to craft one of the most famously grim novels ever written.
How Personal Struggles Shaped Lord of the Flies
Born in 1911 in England, Golding’s difficulties reportedly began at an early age. “He was over-sensitive, timid, fearful, lonely, and imaginative to the point of hallucinations. He was alienated from his parents and his brother, and had no friends,” biographer John Carey wrote of the author's childhood. As a youth, Golding was severely bullied, and these struggles—along with probable PTSD from the war—appear to have manifested in mental health issues later in life.
Golding wound up suffering from alcoholism and is believed to have dealt with depression in his adult life, and all this may have given him some insight into the darkest parts of humanity. “I have always understood the Nazis,” the author once said, “because I am of that sort by nature.” Lord of the Flies, he reflected, emerged “partly out of that sad self-knowledge.”
How Global Events Solidified Golding's Pessimistic Outlook
When World War II rolled around, Golding joined the British Royal Navy and fought in the D-Day landings in 1944. After the war, Golding was left with a new understanding of the extent of human brutality.
“It was simply what seemed sensible for me to write after the war when everyone was thanking God they weren’t Nazis. I’d seen enough to realize that every single one of us could be Nazis,” Golding said of how what he witnessed during the war inspired him to write Lord of the Flies.
At the same time, events like the Holocaust and the rise of totalitarian dictators had given Golding a window into how quickly seemingly civilized societies could completely fall into chaos. Ultimately, he wanted the book to be a reminder that evil can happen anywhere. “You think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent,” Golding later said of the purpose of his novel. “But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here.”
Lord of the Flies also emerged in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events stunned the world and revealed the extent of humanity’s capacity for destruction—and also made their way into Golding's book. The boys are on the plane at the beginning of the novel because they’re fleeing a nuclear disaster, and literary critics have connected the numerous fires that explode across the island in the novel to the specter of the atomic bomb.
“The boys set fire to their island paradise while their elders and betters have all but destroyed the planet,” novelist Ian McEwan wrote of how the chaos in the novel mirrored the state of the wider world at the time. All of these factors came together to create the perfect conditions for Golding's apocalyptic view of human nature.
The Children’s Book That Gave William Golding the Idea For Lord of the Flies
After the war was over, Golding resumed his occupation as a teacher and began working at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. In the evenings, he and his wife Ann often read stories to their young children.
One of these stories was the 1857 adventure novel The Coral Island, which depicts how a group of children stranded on an island survive thanks to Christian values and British cultural norms. One night, Golding joked that it would be a good idea to write a story that portrayed how kids would really act if left alone on an island. His wife encouraged him, and Lord of the Flies was born.
Initially, Golding struggled to get the book published, but it later became a sensation. While the novel made him famous, its notoriety also plagued Golding. In his later years, he began to loathe the book's popularity—because, he reportedly said, “basically I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled.”
Is "Lord of the Flies" Correct About Human Nature?
The question of whether humans are fundamentally good or evil has long sparked philosophical debate. Yet a real-world Lord of the Flies scenario that occurred just a little over a decade after the book was published seemed to indicate that Golding may have been wrong, at least about his specific beliefs about what would happen to youths left to themselves on an island.
In 1965, six boys from the island nation of Tonga really were stranded on an island for fifteen months. They survived, however, by developing a system of teamwork and camaraderie.
“We all come from close and poor families where, whatever you get, you share,” one of the boys, named Sione 'Ulufonua Fataua, told People in 2020 of how the boys made things work on the island for so long. “If anybody had something they didn’t like, they talked about it and we say ‘sorry’ and then pray and everything’s okay. If someone got really mad—like, if I planned something and they didn’t do it—you disappear for a few hours, look at the ocean and clear it out of your mind.”
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