According to Sutherland, Golding – himself a teacher at the sort of grammar school which produced the decent and honourable Ralph – once said that he would happily blow up every public school in England, and Lord of the Flies shows how it is the Jack Merridews produced by the English public school system which are the most capable of wreaking destructive power over others.īut it’s also true that Lord of the Flies bears the influence of another important experience in Golding’s life: his experience in the Second World War fighting in the Royal Navy, which showed him first-hand how ordinary men could become capable of performing acts of great evil. The British class system, then, informs the novel, making it a peculiarly British dissection of power structures.
Coupled with his physical or evolutionary disadvantage (his extreme myopia and reliance on glasses) and he was doomed from the start. He was always destined to be the scapegoat because the English class system dictated it. As Sutherland argues, his use of phrases like ‘the runs’ instead of, say, ‘an upset tummy’ are subtle ways in which Golding, without hammering home Piggy’s origins, reveal his status to the reader.
The island on which the boys are stranded becomes like the island of Great Britain which they left. The message of Lord of the Flies, then, is that if you remove these schoolchildren from Britain, the British class system will still reassert itself as they construct their own stratified ‘society’. Jack has all of the confidence of someone born into privilege and with an almost innate sense of their right to lord it over everyone else. Ralph, therefore, is riddled with self-doubt about his middling position in English society: the Jacks of the world are above him and the Piggies below him.
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