William Golding’s Lord of the Flies- Essay

Below is the required task. For Literature Criticism Presentation.Please note, this is for an IB
student and the quality is expected to be ‘excellent’. Below are the requirements. Should you have
any queries, please reach out without delay.
1. Create a PowerPoint presentation to give to a class (presentation must be accompanied by a
separate talking points / script document)
I. Identify best part of the essayand create discussion points about each part
II. Identify and talk at the thesis
III. Highlight and talk about the starred passages focusing on literature criticism
2. Annotate the essay electronically (in below word doc) by using color code and notes on the side
ESSAY 1:
JAMES R. BAKER CONSIDERS GOLDING, HUXLEY, AND MODERNITY
Surely we have heard enough about William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Published in 1954, it rapidly
gained popularity in England, then in America, then in translation throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia,
until it became one of the most familiar and studied tales of the century. In the 1960s it was rated an
instant classic in the literature of disillusionment that grew out of the latest great war, and we felt certain it
was the perfect fable (more fable than fiction) that spelled out what had gone wrong in that dark and
stormy time and what might devastate our future.
But in the postwar generation a new spirit was rising, a new wind blowing on campus, a new politics
forming to oppose the old establishment and its failures. Golding, proclaimed “Lord of the Campus” by
Time magazine (64) in 1962, was soon found wanting—an antique tragedian, a pessimist, a Christian
moralist who would not let us transcend original sin and the disastrous history of the last 50 years. . . .
The identity assigned to Golding during these years was not substantially altered by his later work. . . .
He remained the man who wrote Lord of the Flies, the man who felt he had to protest his designation as
pessimist even in his Nobel speech of 1983 (Nobel Lecture 149–50). Have we been entirely fair?
Golding’s reputation, like that of any artist, was created not simply by what he wrote or intended but also
by the prevailing mentality of his readership, and often a single work will be selected by that readership as
characteristic or definitive. Writer and reader conspire to sketch a portrait of the artist that may or may not
endure. . . .
In 1962 I began correspondence with Golding in preparation for a book on his work (William Golding:
A Critical Study). My thesis . . . was that the structure and spirit of Lord of the Flies were modeled on
Euripidean tragedy, specifically The Bacchae, and that the later novels also borrowed character and
structure from the ancient tragedians. Golding’s response:
With regard to Greek, you are quite right that I go to that literature for its profound engagement with
first and last things. But though a few years ago it was true I’d read little but Greek for twenty years,
it’s true no longer. The Greek is still there and I go back to it when I feel like that; now I must get in
touch with the contemporary scene, and not necessarily the literary one; the scientific one perhaps.
(Baker and Golding, letter 12 August 1965)
Science? What could he mean? . . .
I interviewed Golding in 1982. . . . Had there been a “classic revolt,” I asked, against his father’s
scientific point of view? After some defense of the father’s complexity of mind, the conclusion was clear:
“But I do think that during the formative years I did feel myself to be in a sort of rationalist atmosphere
against which I kicked” (130). I also asked whether he felt he belonged to the long line of English writers
who, especially since Darwin, had taken scientist and the scientific account of things into their own work
—a line running from Tennyson and including among others Hardy, Wells, Huxley, Snow, Durrell, and
Fowles. . . .

Since Golding’s death in 1993 his work has gone into partial eclipse, as he himself predicted. While we
wait for recovery, if it ever comes, we should adjust our accounts. We shall find that much of the fiction
was oriented and directly influenced by his knowledge of science and that there is an evolution from the
extreme negativism of Lord of the Flies toward greater respect for the scientist and scientific inquiry. The
much discussed sources for the dark fable lie in Golding’s experience of the war, in his connection with
Lord Cherwell’s research into explosives, in the use of the atomic bombs on Japan, in the postwar
revelations of the Holocaust and the horrors of Stalinist Russia—quite enough to bring on the sense of
tragic denouement and, as he said in “A Moving Target” (163), “grief, sheer grief ” as inspiration, if that is
the proper word.
Was there a contemporary literary source or precedent on which he could build his own account of the
failure of humanity and the likelihood of atomic apocalypse? . . . In an address titled “Utopias and
Antiutopias” he comes, inevitably, to Aldous Huxley:
As the war clouds darkened over Europe he and some of our most notable poets removed themselves
to the new world. . . . There Huxley continued to create what we may call antiutopias and utopias
with the same gusto, apparently, for both kinds. One antiutopia is certainly a disgusting job and best
forgotten. . . . Yet I owe his writings much myself, I’ve had much enjoyment from them—in
particular release from a certain starry-eyed optimism which stemmed from the optimistic
rationalism of the nineteenth century. The last utopia he attempted which was technically and strictly
a utopia and ideal state, Island (1962), is one for which I have a considerable liking and respect.
(181) . . .
Huxley was the near-contemporary (17 years separated them) so much admired in the early stage of
Golding’s efforts, and he was quite like Golding—knowledgeable about science and scientists, yet
dedicated to literature, intent upon spiritual experience and a search for an acceptable religious faith.
Huxley’s skeptical views were an update on H. G. Wells and his rather quaint “scientific humanism,” a
faith fading in Huxley’s mind and lost to Golding and many of his generation. . . .
In Golding’s island society the man of reason, the scientist, is represented in the sickly, myopic child
Piggy, the butt of schoolboy gibes, but unfortunately many readers and most critics have failed to
understand his limitations and thus his function in the allegory. This may be explained, in part, by the
uncritical adoration of the scientist in our society, but another factor is the misunderstanding found in the
prestige introduction by E. M. Forster in the first American edition of Lord of the Flies and subsequently
held before our eyes for 40 years. We are asked to “Meet three boys,” Ralph, Jack, and Piggy. We do not
meet Simon at all. Piggy is Forster’s hero, he is “the brains of the party,” “the wisdom of the heart,” “the
human spirit,” and as for the author, “he is on the side of Piggy.” In a final bit of advice we are
admonished: “At the present moment (if I may speak personally) it is respect for Piggy that is most
needed. I do not find it in our leaders” (ix–xii). Actually, rightly understood, Piggy is respected all too
much by our leaders, for he provides the means whereby they wield and extend their powers. Jack must
steal Piggy’s glasses to gain the power of fire. Forster, of course, was the arch-humanist of his day and
apparently a subscriber to the “scientific humanism” Golding wished to demean. Contrast Golding’s
remarks to Jack Biles, a friendly interviewer: “Piggy isn’t wise. Piggy is short-sighted. He is rationalist.
My great curse, you understand, rationalism—and, well he’s that. He’s naïve, short-sighted and rationalist,
like most scientists.”
Scientific advance, he continues, is useful, yet
it doesn’t touch the human problem. Piggy never gets anywhere near coping with anything on that
island. He dismisses the beast . . . says there aren’t such things as ghosts, not understanding that the
whole of society is riddled with ghosts. . . . Piggy understands society less than almost anyone there
at all.
Finally, Piggy is dismissed as a type, a clownish caricature who