Context

• Written in 1954 after WW2 ended
• Golding witnessed the horrors of war as a naval officer during WW2
• Nazi concentration camps before and during the war, Japanese cruelty to prisoners of war, bombing of civilians during WW2
• He wrote an essay stating that "The theme of Lord of the Flies is grief, sheer grief, grief, grief"
• The novel can be interpreted as a political allegory
• The island could symbolise Europe in the 20th century, peace and democracy were threatened by the rise of fascist dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco who abuse their power over others
• Fear of an atomic bomb was very real during the time that Golding wrote "Lord of the Flies", the novel demonstrates the power that gear has over human beings through the boys' creation of the "beast" in their own imagination
• In the 1950s the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union and their allies intensified people's fears
• "Lord of the Flies" was written as a subversion of the famous Victorian novel "Coral Island"
• 3 young British boys, Ralph, Jack and Peterkin are shipwrecked on a desert island and have to survive without any adults, brave and resourceful they thoroughly enjoy their experience and there is never a hint of trouble
• Golding was a teacher in a boys' school, he knew that idyllic life of Coral Island could never exist in real life, so he wrote a novel that showed his ideas about the darker side of human nature starting from the same basis
• Golding disliked the snobbery of the British class system
• He grew up in Marlborough and attended the grammar school there, when studying at Oxford University he felt socially inferior to other students as he was the only one who attended a grammar school opposed to an elite public school