Lord of the Flies Context

Context of the Novel:

Personal Experiences:

• Golding studied Natural Sciences and then English in Oxford.
• He later worked as an actor, producer and writer.
• After that he became a teacher at an all boys school.
• When the Second World War broke out he served in the Royal Navy.

The two important elements of Golding’s life and experience that are powerfully reflected in Lord of the Flies are:

• His pessimism (seeing the worst in things) after the Second World War.
• His insight into children’s behaviour - from his life as a schoolmaster.

Golding sets the story in an age when the world is at war and the children are evacuated from a war zone. The novel presents his ideas that:

• Everyone is capable of evil, given the circumstances. 
• People were wrong, after the war, to feel relieved about not having been Nazis.

He understood that being British was no protection from being evil. The British schoolchildren, as the novel closes, are prepared to kill each other. 

Cold War Paranoia:

• The Cold War involved the USSR and the USA, both powerful nations with nuclear weapons. Both sides were afraid of each other, so they avoided a direct conflict.
• The nations involved themselves in minor conflicts in different parts of the world and threatened each other but avoided an all-out nuclear war.

The first use of atomic weapons in war (Hiroshima, Japan - 1945) undermined many people’s assumptions about life:

• Suddenly it seemed possible for the whole of civilisation to be destroyed by a single conflict.

• In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first A-bomb and the Cold War began in its earnest. This was not an open war, but was an ideological battle in which everyone suspected of being the enemy would be attacked.
• Through the late 1940s and early 1950s many respected and influential people were destroyed by accusations that they were Communists. 

It was in this…