William Golding - the writer of philosophical and allegorical novels.

The prominent place in modern English literature is taken by William Golding due to his philosophical and allegorical novels. He was educated at Grammar School and at Oxford. He was in the Navy during World War II. Golding is the author of a number of essays, radio plays, short stories, a good deal of poetry, but his name first became known to the general public when his novel Lord of the Flies was published in 1954. It appeared as a response to Robert Michael Ballantyne's novel Coral Island (1838). That novel irritated Gold­ing by its vitality and romanticism when he read the book already after the war. The group of children who happened on an uninhab­ited island behaved themselves like real gentlemen. They were kind and humane, the fire they made united them. Golding's war experi­ence installed him in the idea that evil and cruelty are inherent in man and can not be explained only by the pressure of social mecha­nisms. He said that the basis of evil is to be found inside the coun­try and its people. The cruelty of fascism and the war horrors made the writer think over the fate of mankind and nature of man.

Lord of the Flies. His novel Lord of the Flies is written as a warning about the subsequences of fascism. This novel has been called a modern classic and has had great popularity. The story tells of how nice people can, under certain circumstances, become savag­es very quickly. It is a story about a group of boys who found themselves on a desert island when their plane was shot down, and all the grown ups perished. The island is not a real island; it sym­bolizes everyone who tries to act with common sense: to keep order, to built huts on the beach, to keep a fire on the mountain top as a signal. They make the fire like Ballantyne's boys did, but the fire disunites them. Stealing fire is denying the very idea of democratic equality and the conception of self estimation of individuals. Intelligent and clever boys from respectable families turn into a tribe of savages with the ugly features of tribal consciousness. The image of the beast is materialization of fear which the boys experience be­cause they feel defenseless not only before power of nature but before each other. The original group splits into two - united around Ralph and around Jack. Simon and Piggy are the only boys whom Ralph really trusts. Jack's group is called "savages". They paint their faces, hunt pigs, kill them and then in the evening dance around "The,Dance of Death". They turn into savages forgetting all norms of civilized society they were born into. Jack is only interest­ed in hunting and power. It was sort of a game at first. They hunted pigs, and enjoyed it. "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood!" But very soon hunting down the beast turns into hunting down a human being. "I cut the pig's throat," said Jack, proudly, and yet twitched as he said it. "Can I borrow yours, Ralph, to make a nick" in the hilt?" The pig's head, covered by myriads of flies, is materi­alization of emanation of evil. It is stated by Ralph when he says, "I fear ourselves." The boys regress to savagery take real savages they tear Simon during their dance and then brutally and deliber­ately smash Piggy with a huge stone. In reversing the pattern of children's adventure stories and locating evil in the boys them­selves, Golding reenergized the notion of original sin. Civilization regresses rapidly. Though Golding shows that not all boys turn into savages. Ralph, Piggy, Simon, Eric and Sam still leave the hope of possibility to fight and conquer evil.

"Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was scorched up like dead wood - Simon was dead - and Jack had.... The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fail through the air of thetrue, wise friend called Piggy." This is a serious warning to the world of grown-ups whose inner cruelty and savageness showed up openly and disastrously in the war.

Other novels by William Golding are The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956). Free Fall (1959), The Spin (1964), The Pyramid (1967), Envoy Extraordinary (1971), Darkness Visible (1979), Rites of Pas­sage (1980), A Moving Target (1984) and others.

Facile fashionable doctrines of progress and evolution are up-­ended in The Inheritors where we see a crucial stage in the rise of our species through the eyes of Neanderthal man (and hear a good deal of his utterance too). Neanderthal man is innocent, pious and amiable, while our own progenitor, Homo sapiens, who comes to displace him in the process of evolutionary development, is double-minded and capable of self-deception. The theme of the human fall is present again. In Pincher Martin a shipwrecked sailor imagines that he is clinging to a bare rock desperate to survive. His past is recalled; but at the end we learn that he died in the wreck and that the whole recollection has taken place at the point of drowning. Free Fall is the study of Sammy Mountjoy, a successful artist, how he loses his soul and is brought up against the consequences when the girl he has seduced goes insane. In The Spire Golding studies the moral and spiritual condition of Jocelin, dean of a cathedral, whose obsessive resolve to build a great cathedral spire regardless of the consequences has a dual motivation in faith and in sheer self-assertion, through which the powers of heaven and hell collide. Golding continued to produce novels in which he experiments boldly with substance and style.

William Golding is also the author of the play The Brass Batterfly (1958), a collection of verse Poems (1934), and the books of essays The Hot Gates (1965) and A Moving Target (1982).

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