Understanding Lord of the Flies: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (The Greenwood Press Literature in Context Series)

228 Pages·2000·14.06 MB·English

by  Kirstin Olsen

T ndertstanding
Lord of the Ries
The Greenwood Press "Literature in Context" Series
Student Casebooks to Issues, Sources, and HistoricalHistorical Documentsal Dal D Documents
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Literature of World War II
by Claudia Durst Johnson by James H. Meredith
Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl Macbeth
by Hedda Rosner Kopf by Faith Nostbakken
Animal Farm Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and
by John Rodden The Pearl
by Claudia Durst Johnson
The Call of the Wild
by Claudia Durst Johnson Pride and Prejudice
by Debra Teachman
The Catcher in the Rye
by Sanford and Ann Pinsker A Raisin in the Sun
by Lynn Domina
The Crucible
by Claudia Durst Johnson and The Red Badge of Courage
Vernon E. Johnson by Claudia Durst Johnson
Death of a Salesman Richard Wright's Black Boy
by Brenda Murphy and by Robert Felgar
Susan C. W. Abbotson
Romeo and Juliet
The Grapes of Wrath by Alan Hager
by Claudia Durst Johnson
The Scarlet Letter
Great Expectations by Claudia Durst Johnson
by George Newlin
Shakespeare's/#//«* Caesar
The Great Gatsby by Thomas Derrick
by Dalton Gross and
A Tale of Two Cities
Maryjean Gross
by George Newlin
Hamlet
Things Fall Apart
by Richard Corum
by Kalu Ogbaa
/ Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Joanne Megna-Wallace
by Claudia Durst Johnson
Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were
by Deborah Mistron
Watching God
by Neai A. Lester
UNDERSTANDINQ
Lord of the Flies
A STUDENT CASEBOOK TO
ISSUES, SOURCES, AND
HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
Kirstin Olsen
The Qreenwood Press
"Literature in Context" Series
Claudia Durst Johnson, Series Editor
QRLENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut * London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olsen, Kirstin.
Understanding Lord of the flies : a student casebook to issues, sources, and
historical documents / Kirstin Olsen.
p. cm.—(The Greenwood Press "Literature in context" series, ISSN
1074-598X)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-313-30723-7 (alk. paper)
1. Golding, William, 1911- Lord of the flies. 2. Survival after airplane acci
dents, shipwrecks, etc., in literature. 3. Boys in literature. I. Tide. II. Series.
PR6013.O35 L639 2000
823'.914—dc21 99-089787
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2000 by Kirstin Olsen
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without
the express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-089787
ISBN: 0-313-30723-7
ISSN: 1074-598X
First published in 2000
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Copyright Acknowledgments
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for the use of the
following material:
The excerpt from John Betjeman, SUMMONED BY BELLS, appears by permission
of John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
The interview with Noriko M , "Japanese School Culture," appears by permis
sion of the interviewee.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYN
THESIS by Edward O. Wilson, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copy
right © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Reprinted by permission of The Peters Fraser and Dunlop Group Limited on
behalf of T. E. B. Howarth, PROSPECT AND REALITY: GREAT BRITAIN, 1945-
1955. © T. E. B. Howarth 1985.
Excerpts from TALK: CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM GOLDING by Jack I. Biles,
copyright © 1970 by Jack Biles and renewed 1998 by Edith L. Biles, reprinted by
permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
To my father, Brian Olsen,
this book is respectfully
and affectionately dedicated.
Contents
AcknowledgmentsAc ix
Introductiononx xxi
1. Literary Analysis 1
2. The Ignoble Savage 27
FROM:
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, vol. 2 (1719) 38
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden (1899) 42
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
(2nd ed., 1845) 46
3. Education 53
FROM:
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) 72
P. G. Wodehouse, Mike (1909) 76
John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (I960) 79
VUl Contents
An Interview with Noriko M , "Japanese School
Culture" (September 9, 1999) 82
4. The Adventure Story 89
FROM:
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson
(1812-13) 98
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, vol. 1 (1719) 104
R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (1858) 107
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, Chapter 28
(1883) 114
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, Chapter 18
(1883) 116
5. Religion 123
FROM:
The Old Testament 130
The New Testament 134
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
(1536) 137
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer 139
6. Biology, Evolution, and Lord of the Flies 143
FROM:
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) 152
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
(1975) 157
7. War and Postwar 167
FROM:
T.E.B. Howarth, Prospect and Reality: Great Britain,
1945-1955 (1985) 179
Jack I. Biles, Talk: Conversations with William
Golding (1970) 185
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg [sic]
Military Tribunals (1950) 190
Index 203
Acknowledgments
When I was a child, my family home had an entire wall of its
cathedral-ceilinged kitchen devoted to books. Shelf upon shelf of
books rose to a height of about fourteen feet, and a library ladder
on wheels rolled along to allow access. There were other book
shelves in the house—one in the breakfast alcove, and several in
my sister's room and mine—but this was the main repository of
our home's printed matter. It was an astoundingly miscellaneous
collection. There were cookbooks, spy novels, Victorian classics,
several years' worth of American Heritage from the years when
that magazine was still issued in hardback, encyclopedias and other
reference books, and two volumes that, despite their cloth binding,
had never actually been published. One was a collection of poems
written by my father as a young man, and the other was his Prince
ton senior thesis, written in 1964 and entitled "The Novels of Wil
liam Golding."
Long before I had any idea of who William Golding was and
what he might have written, the thesis, with its glorious binding
and my father's name on the spine, fascinated me. Its very exis
tence proved that people I knew could write books. From that
revelation it was not a very long jump to the conclusion that I
could probably write a book, too. It eventually seemed so inevi
table that I would do so that, in tenth grade, with characteristic