1. The Lord of the Flies

3.  Joined the Royal Navy in 1940; the experience had an impact on his fiction  The Lord of the Flies (1954), bestseller  „Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of society... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head” („Fable”)

4.  The pre-text of Golding’s novel: Robert Michael Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1858).  Rousseauistic education: boys learn to gather, hunt, cook, fight, save and hide not through instruction but through necessity.  The novel explores the idea of human evil (similarly to Heart of Darkness)

5. 1. Compare Ralph and Jack! What do they represent in the novel? How and why does Jack become the ‘real’ leader? 2. Interpret the title of the novel! How does evil appear in the text? 3. What does the conch shell, the fire, and the pig represent in the novel? 4. What is the role of Simon in the novel? In what sense does he allegorize morality?