Golding’s Narrowed Attempts at Defining Human Nature in Lord of the Flies
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to prove the assumption that William Golding is a failure who claims to have written his novel Lord of the Flies on the idea of human nature. He considers that he wrote about human nature in general, but he is a Western and has those ideas of being superior to other people. He takes all his characters from among the English boys. Not a single character who is shown as civilized belongs to a marginalized race. This act of Golding reveals his ethnocentric attitude. He does not bother to include a female character in this novel. All his characters are male. It shows his androcentric nature. Though he tries to put the evil like every man whenever he wants to show the brutality or savagery of a human, in the form of his chosen English boys, he portrays them as the hunters of Africa or paints them with mud. In doing so, he is affiliating savagery with the blacks and Indians. Thus, he propagates the same stereotypical concept of “Orients” as uncivilized and savages. Golding relies solely on the biological factors of human nature. He ignores to consider any social problem for the conflict of the two groups of boys. These social factors may include political system, religion, or Marxism. This research work has proved that Golding’s self-critique of human nature in the novel is a failure on his part.