On Those Texts That Have Been Over-Analyzed: Lord of the Flies

About ten years ago, when I was first getting my start as a teacher, I wrote a reflective little piece as part of this woefully neglected non-fiction series I’ve been working on about teaching various canonical works. It had me thinking about said works’ place in the canon, problems of returning to specific works (to the exclusion of others) over and over again, and why I’ve continued to find them relevant in the modern era, that sort of thing. The piece in question was focused on the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Lord of the Flies is of course the kind of book that has a way of sticking with you, given the grim subject matter — a bunch of boys stranded on an island without any adult supervision who then descend into primal chaos and begin murdering each other. It’s more than that, of course. It’s a story about human nature and what people in desperate circumstances might be willing to do, particularly when freed of the restraints of established order. But the shocking image of children hurting children gives it an added potency and enlivens every allusion to the tenuous nature of our own “civil” society.

At the time of first writing the piece I was mainly concerned with the reasons people have eschewed books in the modern era. Why don’t people enjoy reading? I wondered about the counterproductive effects of being forced to read in school. I wondered about the problems of having an English canon.

I’ve come to realize that people enjoy reading more, as a rule, than is understood in the contemporary popular imagination but their reading habits have definitely changed. I’d further add that even if it were true that they didn’t enjoy reading, it’s missing a point that’s become far more important: assessing the consequences of losing this sense of “thinking about things” so intrinsic to the act of reading.

We return, as things almost always must in this era, to the political (maybe they always should have been, in every era, and it was just naivety and privilege that had me feeling otherwise; I suspect this is the case). In the era of Obama, we had what seemed to people like myself, on top of the important epoch of the arrival of the first African American president, a return to the president as public intellectual.