1. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
2. Significance with the Title: Lord of the Flies can be a reference to Beelzebub, which translates to "God of the Flies" and synonym of Satan, evil. It can also be a reference to a line from King Lear, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to gods."
3. Author and Background: William Gerald Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in Cornwall England. His father was a schoolmaster and his mother was a suffragette. His parents had wanted him to study science, until the second year of college. However, after his second year of college, he abandoned the study of science for English literature. He wrote poetry and worked in amateur theater for a while before entering the Royal navy at World War II and served with distinction on mine sweepers, destroyers, and rocket launchers. He believed that the horrors of World War II were based on some innate evil. After the war, he returned to teaching and writing, He was able to get Lord of the Flies published and it was a success.
4. Genre: allegory; microcosm; adventure: The novel is a microcosm of the bigger world, society. The island on which the boys find themselves is allegorically our world in miniature. The division of the boys in litluns and big'uns is the allegory of the classes in our world. Litluns symbolize the common people, while the big'uns are the allegory of the ruling, powerful and political classes. Greed, power, domination is all factors of evil in the story line and in today’s society. The first human instinct is survival. The fittest will survive, as in the book, and in today’s world.
5. Major Themes: loss of innocence; men are naturally savages at heart: As the boys turn from civilized, well-behaving, uniformed children to cruel, savaged hunters, they lose their innocence that they possessed at the beginning of the novel. Jack and the hunters abandon the democracy and all the laws that were created by everybody, and become anarchists.
6. Minor Themes: survival;...