Lord of the Flies · GCSE English Literature

Plot

During a war, a plane carrying British schoolboys crashes on an uninhabited tropical island. There are no adults.
Ralph is elected chief and uses a conch shell to call meetings. Piggy, clever but mocked, advises him. The boys build shelters and a signal fire, lit using Piggy's glasses.
Jack, head of the choirboys, leads the hunters. Obsessed with hunting pigs, they let the fire go out just as a ship passes. Fear of a 'beast' spreads.
Jack breaks away and forms his own tribe. Simon, alone in the forest, sees a pig's head on a stick, the 'Lord of the Flies', and discovers that the 'beast' is a dead parachutist. When he runs to tell the others, the boys, in a frenzied dance during a storm, kill him.
Jack's tribe steals Piggy's glasses. Roger kills Piggy with a boulder, and the conch is smashed. The tribe hunts Ralph and sets the island on fire. A naval officer arrives and rescues them, and Ralph weeps.

Civilisation and savagery, power and leadership, fear, the loss of innocence, and the evil within human nature.

The conch stands for order and democracy; Piggy's glasses for intelligence and science; the signal fire for hope of rescue; the beast for the boys' own fear and evil; and the Lord of the Flies for the evil inside everyone.

William Golding published it in 1954. He had served in the Royal Navy in the Second World War, and wrote during the Cold War, in the nuclear age.
It responds to The Coral Island (1857), an adventure story in which stranded British boys behave well. Golding suggests the opposite: at the end, Ralph weeps for 'the end of innocence' and 'the darkness of man's heart'.