Lord of the flies - William Golding

Advantages: good story
Disadvantages: Quite long when reading is school.

The novel starts off with the description and background information of the main characters and the atmosphere around them. The reader is forced to read the rest of the novel and find the answers to the questions they have after reading the introduction. It is set on a deserted island which is very effective because the characters can not escape and have to stay with those characters they don't like or characters who bully them. The setting is also ...
...survive? Some of the characters are also described with light and colour to show the mood and atmosphere around them. The opening chapter also gives hints on the conflicts between the characters. Golding has used symbolism to guide or warn the readers of what might happen next in the novel. The first and the most important character introduced is Ralph. He is described as "the fair boy" and was wearing his school uniform when the plane crashed into ... Read review

Advantages: An enchanting tale of a group of young boys' loss of innocence
Disadvantages: None

Unlike many others who have reviewed this book, I was not forced to study it at school. My sister had trouble studying it for her GCSE examination set text so I agreed to read it and help her with it; and as I remembered enjoying it I thought it’d be worth buying for another read! PLOT SYNOPSIS A plane evacuating a bundle of schoolchildren from the horrors of the Second World War crashes into a desert island: the pilot dies and subsequently the ...
...The first character we are introduced to is Ralph; a confident, well built, tanned twelve year old. Immediately after, Ralph encounters a short fat boy. Together they celebrate the absence of any adults, free to roam around the idyllic island. Being a naturally trusting character, the fat boy almost immediately confides his nickname the children from his school had given him: ‘Piggy.’ Ralph laughs and mocks him but Piggy insists that Ralph keep it ... Read review

Advantages: Superbly written, imaginative detail
Disadvantages: May have been over analysed in schools

...has both read the book Lord of the Flies and watched the TV series Lost could not help to notice the similarities. Being that William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954 he is considered to be well beyond his time in his writing. I first read this book for my GCSEs and have read it again and again since, having much more enjoyment reading it for pleasure than analysing every single sentence. The Author ************** William Golding was born ...
...Literature at Oxford. He wrote twelve novels in his career as well as many poems, plays and essays. His first peice of writing was published when he was just 23. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 and died 10 years later. The Characters ****************** For me there are four main characters in this book and then two seperate groups of secondary characters, I have also compared them against characters in Lost for those who ... Read review

Advantages: Can be analysed on many different scales.
Disadvantages: Can be seen s as simplistic and boring if the true menaing is not understood

...you can definitely do with Lord of the Flies. On the simplest level, it can be taken as a story of bullying, where one child takes power of the majority and then picks on the weak one who always speaks his mind and seems to stick out like a sore thumb. On a deeper level, it looks at the possibility that most people, despite the fact they have come from civilised societies, can turn in to a savage brutal beings. Further more, when this brutality ...
...or logic reason. Hence, Lord of the Flies is one of those books which not only an individual can relate but can also be related to a nation. Later on in the story when the bully has fully formed his group of followers and taken them aside and created his own 'tribe', he informs then that there is a beast which they need to kill. This beast is a metaphor for evil, is represented in the book by the head of a pig. The interesting thing about this point ... Read review

Advantages: a real modern classic with a moral
Disadvantages: the school connection puts a lot of people off

...teachers!), is the island setting. Lord of the Flies has a strong connection with an earlier novel, Coral Island, by R.M. Ballantyne. In this novel a group of boys set up a civilisation and overcome numerous difficulties. Golding obviously felt that this view of human nature was false, and so in Lord of the Flies the boys have everything they need to survive but their society still falls apart. This can also be seen as a damning denouncement of ...
...to believe the brutality of Lord of the Flies, but this novel was written after experiences during the war in which, according to Golding, such brutality did occur. The message is still valid today, so don’t let the school connection or age of the book put you off. (I think this opinion may actually be longer than the report I wrote at school – and quite, frankly, this is more than long enough!) ... Read review