William Golding's Lord of the Flies is about evil; and it recounts a quest for order amidst the disorder that evil causes. Golding has said that the theme of the novel "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." Theme and moral are worked out through an adaptation of the Christian myth of the Fall of Man, which has been overlaid with what may be termed the myth of the desert island. Since Golding is a serious student of Greek, and has stated that Euripides is one of his literary influences, it is not surprising that in Lord of the Flies …show more content…
Other passages paralleling incidents in Paradise Lost may be said, in contrast, to be based on the supernatural. In the one, Golding's boys represent the earliest man and his Fall in Eden; in the second, they represent the fallen angels, or devils, and the island is Hell. Golding makes clear that Jack and the choirboys are devils—fallen angels. Curiously, no critic has commented on why they are choirboys and not just ordinary schoolboys. Golding, having "worked out very carefully in every possible way this novel," certainly had a definite purpose in making them so. Even though the concept of angels as singers is both traditional and common, Golding points out the connection between the boys and angels explicitly. He says that "ages ago"—a repeated phrase connecting the singing boys and the singing birds of "that first morning"—the boys "had stood in two demure rows and their voices had been the song of angels." A double irony is at work here. The phrase means that the boys, who are devils, sang like angels and also that they sang songs of angels; that is, liturgic chants which, on the island, undergo pagan and savage metamorphosis into " Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!" (which Golding terms a "chant" rising