Golding's 1954 novel places a group of British schoolboys on an uninhabited island after a plane crash with no adults, and follows their attempt at self-government and its collapse into violence. Golding wrote it against the tradition of adventure stories in which British boys demonstrate civilised competence in such circumstances, and specifically against R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island.
The political structure is the substance. Ralph is elected on the basis of the conch shell he found and organises around rescue, shelter and the signal fire. Jack builds an alternative power base around hunting, meat and the provision of excitement, and Golding shows the transfer of allegiance occurring not through argument but through the satisfaction of immediate wants. Piggy holds the intelligence and the glasses that make fire possible and has no standing because he is physically weak and socially marginal. Simon understands what is happening and cannot communicate it.
Golding's argument is that the defects of society trace to the defects of human nature, which he stated directly, and that civilisation is a restraint rather than a condition. The beast the boys fear turns out to be themselves.
The novel has been criticised on several grounds. Its claim about human nature is asserted through a constructed scenario rather than demonstrated. Rutger Bregman documented an actual case in which six shipwrecked Tongan boys cooperated successfully for fifteen months, which runs directly against Golding's premise. The characters are all boys of a specific class and nationality. Its value for organisational readers is the depiction of how legitimate authority is displaced by whoever satisfies immediate wants.
Readers interested in how authority and rules break down in a group, aware that the premise is asserted through construction rather than evidence.
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