🚨 Spoilers ahead. That's the whole point. If you wanted to be surprised, you should have read the book.
A plane carrying British schoolboys during wartime evacuation crashes on an uninhabited island. No adults survive. Ralph is elected leader and calls meetings with a conch. Piggy supplies brains and glasses. Jack leads the hunters, then breaks away to form a tribe. Simon is killed by the boys in a frenzy. Roger kills Piggy with a boulder. Jack's tribe hunts Ralph and sets the island on fire. A naval officer arrives, and the boys weep. Civilization lasted about as long as the fruit.
- The book had a different title first. Golding's original title was Strangers from Within. It became Lord of the Flies before Faber and Faber published it in 1954.
- Publishers turned it down repeatedly. Golding's first novel was rejected by a long run of publishers before Faber and Faber took it on and printed it in 1954. It later became a staple of school reading lists.
- The title is an old name for the devil. Lord of the Flies translates Beelzebub, from the Hebrew Ba'al Zevuv, a name used for the devil. Golding hangs that grand title on something far less grand than a demon.
- “The boys got shipwrecked on that island.” Wrong kind of wreck. There is no ship. The boys land there when their plane is shot down during a wartime evacuation, and no grown-up walks out of the fuselage.
- “The Lord of the Flies is a monster.” Pig, not monster. It is a sow's head that Jack's hunters leave on a sharpened stick as an offering to the beast. The actual beast turns out to be a dead parachutist.
- “Ralph gets killed at the end.” Ralph survives, relax. The hunters chase him across the burning island until he stumbles onto the beach and finds a naval officer. Ralph weeps. Rescue arrives before the hunters can get to him.
- If they say: “It's just boys being savages, basically.”
You say: “I say Piggy's glasses are the real story. They start the fire, Jack's tribe steals them, and Ralph goes to get them back. That's where it stops being a game.” - If they say: “Golding clearly made all this up from nothing.”
You say: “I say he was answering another book. The naval officer at the end compares the scene to R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, where cheerful boys on an island stay civilized.”
🍸 Your Bar Line
Lord of the Flies is schoolboys, a conch, a pair of glasses, a pig's head on a stick, and a naval officer who shows up after two boys are already dead.
