Mob Mentality in ‘Lord of the Flies’: from Order to Chaos

Narrative Structure and Historical Influences: Tracing Golding’s Intentions in ‘Lord of the Flies’

This novel is divided into twelve chapters. These twelve chapters go in order with the events happening on the island with the boys. One technique used is flashback when the boys remember events that happened before the plane crashed… One of the techniques that this novel is organized by is sequencing. Then, they wanted to act civilized, and they tried to make leaders and voted for their leader, Ralph.

He was a fair leader but also made fun of Piggy. Then, they found a way to draw a map. During the process of building the map, they made more civilized rules, which were to raise your hand when you wanted to talk, and then they got organized and made people have different tasks to help them survive. Then Simon starts building shelters, and the littluns are living like savages because they are filthy and don’t shower, and they are doing savage things. Then they find the beast, and they are frightened about it. Next, Simon was killed by mistake because they thought that he was the beast. Then Jack got angry at Ralph, then Jack stabbed Ralph. Then Piggy gets killed by Roger. The conch got crushed, too. Then it is only Jack, his hunters, and Ralph, and Jack and his hunters try to kill Ralph, but just in time, Ralph gets rescued.

William Golding’s internal intentions were that this book was based on times in the 1800’s. The 1800s was the time that World War Two was going on. At the beginning of the novel, they are on a plane, and they are trying to get away from the war and their society, and that’s why they want to go somewhere else. Also, one reason why the author might have written this book was because

Mob Mentality in ‘Lord of the Flies’: Golding’s Insightful Glimpses into the Human Psyche

Golding employs a third-person omniscient narrator in Lord of the Flies, meaning that the narrator speaks in a voice separate from that of any of the characters and sometimes narrates what the characters are thinking and feeling as well as what they’re doing. The narrator only gives us insights into the thoughts of characters sparingly, however. Most often, the narrator describes what the characters are doing and how they’re interacting as seen from the outside. The narrator’s point of view is sometimes that of an objective observer of all of the boys, as in the scenes where they’re all meeting and interacting, but sometimes the narrator will follow the point of view of one boy by himself. The characters whose point of view we see most frequently are Ralph, Jack, Simon, and Piggy. The narrator devotes the most time to Ralph, describing not just his thoughts but his thought process—”Then, at the moment of greatest passion and conviction, that curtain flapped in his head, and he forgot—what he had been driving at.” The reader also gets a sense of Ralph’s home life in an extended reverie where he remembers, “When you went to bed, there was a bowl of cornflakes with sugar and cream.… Everything was all right; everything was good-humored and friendly.”

The narrator reflects Jack’s internal thought the least out of all the major characters, but still takes the reader inside his head, as after he kills the so “His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come them when they had closed in on the struggling pig…” We also spend brief amounts of time inside the heads of littluns in order to show that the impulses ruling the main characters are universal and innate. We only see these characters briefly, such as Henry, who becomes “absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things,” or Maurice, who still feels “the unease of wrongdoing” when he throws sand in Percival’s eye. Golding shows that even the youngest boys experience lust for power or remorse for causing pain. Yet he mostly shows the littluns from a distanced perspective. This technique likens them to a generic mob, capable of acting as a single organism, as when they join Jack’s tribe and unquestioningly participate in the pursuit of Ralph. By switching between brief interior glimpses into specific littluns and presenting them as a single character, the narrator shows the way the individual is susceptible to mob mentality.

References

1. Golding, William. “Lord of the Flies.” Faber and Faber, 1954.
2. Reiff, Raychel Haugrud. “Understanding ‘Lord of the Flies’: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents.” Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.
3. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, and Ian Gregor. “William Golding: A Critical Study.” Faber and Faber, 1984.
4. Olson, Kirstin. “Understanding ‘Lord of the Flies’: A Novel by William Golding.” Gale, 2005.

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