Golding served in World War II and realized that reason alone cannot always restrain violence. In “Lord of the Flies” he shows how stranded boys first build order and then destroy it, symbolically revealing the darkness in human nature. Objects such as the conch shell (democratic rule) and Piggy’s glasses (science and intellect) act as symbols that make abstract ideas concrete. By weaving in myths and Biblical motifs, Golding makes the story universal across time and culture. The novel can also be read as a critique of society during the 1950s, when fear of nuclear war was rising.

Golding’s oeuvre is driven by a sharp scepticism toward nineteenth-century humanism. “Lord of the Flies” restages a Hobbesian state of nature through a dual layer of realism and mythic symbolism, overturning the conventional image of children as innocents. Borrowing the framework of R.M. Ballantyne’s adventure fiction, the novel dismantles the myth of linear progress by charting the step-by-step collapse of civilization. Later works such as “Pincher Martin” and “Free Fall” interrogate the borders of the self through split consciousness and quasi-religious experience, linking Golding to mid-century existentialist debates. Scholars compare him with myth-criticism (Frye, Campbell), asking how his narrative devices mediate between universality and historicity. In this way he inherits the modernist legacy of Conrad and Faulkner while anticipating the moral dilemmas that would occupy post-colonial literature.

Golding overlays mythic codes onto a realist framework, creating a stratified narrative space. The island in “Lord of the Flies” aligns with Victor Turner’s liminality, and the boys’ descent into anarchy can be read as an anthropological rite of passage. Reified symbols—the conch and the sow’s head—function as composite topoi in which Freudian Thanatos intersects with Lévi-Straussian bricolage. Golding’s wartime experience intersects with critiques of Nazism and nuclear eschatology, resonating with Cold-War virtue ethics. Temporal contraction and expansion, analyzable via Gérard Genette’s narratological speed, serve to mythologize the text’s atemporality. Post-structuralist readings since the 1990s foreground dispersed subjectivity and multiple narrative layers, reassessing the politics of écriture. Ecocritical scholarship reinterprets the island as a space that foregrounds resource finitude and Anthropocene crisis.