Why Lord of The Flies?

Why should I consider Lord of the Flies a work of evolution fiction when it is clearly not about any sort of prehistoric past? The answer is simple. First, William Golding was no stranger to the prehistoric ficiton genre. He had written prehistoric fiction  prior to writing Lord of the Flies. In 1955, Golding published The Inheritors, a story following the final extinction of neanderthals by a competitive brand of humans. Golding, as a novelist, clearly had the misty history of man on his mind. And when he wrote Lord of the Flies he was able to set his novel in a place where the niceties, or paint, of tradition and civilization were stripped away and what remained was the core of man--both its beauty and its ugliness--which was at one time a staple of the prehistoric genre and is now a principle of evolution fiction. By using the secluded island and a band of boys, Golding explored the essence and growth of man without having to set his novel in some far away epoch.

The second reason that Lord of the Flies falls into the evolution fiction genre is because the subject matter of EF is the same regardless of time or age. Lord of the Flies is an expression of survival under dire circumstances without the mushy romanticism of more recent prehistoric ficiton and what some people can and will do in this position, and this is exactly the territory that evolution fiction charts out. Lord of the Flies is EF because the boys on the island must struggle against both nature and the perverse actions of other men, which is a theme central and dear to the evolution fiction genre as a whole.

Whereas in the last twenty years, and while still narrating the struggles of man's distant past, prehistoric fiction has become, well, soft. And while the subject matter might on its face be rather dire, its treatment is romantic in the feel good sense of the word. Gone is the struggle, beauty, and violence of the murky pagan past. In its place, and in the name of prehistoric fiction, writers craft tales more fit for sheltered house wives and aging and equally sheltered males.

In this treatment, the strength of man is papered over for ideology and moralism. Even the hard face of nature and the triumphs of people and the excellence of their achievements is muddied in the waters. And this is what Golding did not do in either his prehistoric fiction or in Lord of the Flies. In Lord of the Flies he was able to express a feeling of life, not simply a comment on war or human nature, that speaks to what is at the heart of evolution ficiton and is a necessary correction to the prehistoric fiction in favor now.