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Background

The book was written during the first years of the Cold War and the atomic age; the events arise in the context of an unnamed nuclear war. The boys whose actions form the superficial subject of the book are from a school in Great Britain. Some are ordinary students, while others arrive as an already-coherent body under an established leader; so does, for example, the choir. The book portrays their descent into savagery, contrasting with other books that had lauded the inevitable ascendancy of a higher form of human nature, as in Two Years’ Vacation, published by Jules Verne in 1888. Left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.

At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting impulses toward civilization—live by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and towards the will to power. Different subjects include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, forms a major subtext of Lord of The Flies.^[4]

Many of these themes were controversial at the time of the book's publication.