"Most readers believe Golding meant to highlight the innate brutality that emerges when human beings are left to their own devices in a place where there are no rules, enforcement, or morality to protect the weak from the strong. Lord of the Flies is seen as a Darwinian testament: deep down in our biology, we are savages, and we must be taught-or rewired-to behave with kindness, respect, and mercy."
"Thorne believes that interpretation is nonsense. "I don't think this is about boys in a state of nature. I don't buy any of those sorts of arguments," he tells Esquire. In fact, he sees it somewhat the opposite way. "This is not about who we are when we're at our essence," Thorne says. "It's about a group of kids that come with a culture and a socialization that they then reenact on the island. They are products of their parents.""
"With no surviving adults, and no rescue in sight, the boys form a crude society that all too soon succumbs to cruelty and bloodshed. What leads someone so young and seemingly innocent so far astray? It's an enduringly vital question, one that also haunted the late Lord of the Flies author William Golding, whose 1954 novel focused on a group of boys marooned on an uninhabited island after a plane crash."
A story about boys on an uninhabited island centers on how cruelty and bloodshed develop without adults, rules, or enforcement. The original narrative has been read as evidence of innate brutality that surfaces when morality and protection for the weak disappear. A new adaptation reframes the cause of violence by rejecting the idea of a natural state of savagery. The violence is presented as something kids reenact from the culture and socialization they bring with them. The underlying explanation becomes nature versus nurture, with harmful “code” tied to upbringing and misunderstanding rather than biology alone.
Read at Esquire
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]