“Sucks to your ass-mar.”

Everyone who read Lord of The Flies by William Golding would remember this quote. These words, said by a child, stuck in mind throughout the book.

Lord of The Flies is one of the required readings for English 11 in Glen Rock High School. It is not only an interesting story but also conveys a meaningful message.

Approaching the story from a literary perspective, Golding wrote it as an allegory — a story that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning and uses many literary devices such as symbolization, foreshadowing, and allusion. For the story, it is a boys’ thrilling adventure in an island without any grown-ups, and it is enough to attract a lot of people especially teenagers.

As summarized on Wikipedia: Lord of the Flies is a dystopian novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results.

Mr. Milsovic, GRHS English teacher, however describes the book in one sentence: “Primal instincts must always be kept in check.”

Golding says that human behavior changes when ordinary social controls are absent through the story, as it shows what happens when the rules and order of everyday society are slowly stripped away — that is the allegory.

“I think Golding exploded [tghe] concept of people’s nature,” Sean Lynch, GRHS junior said. “And, I liked that.”

 The most important literary devices used in the book is symbolism, and the most definite symbol is ‘conch’. It shows the establishment of rules and order and then the collapse of it using the conch, which is really creative.

“At the beginning of the story, the conch represents the order. But when it is broken, it shows that the society stripped away,” Jake Bennis, GRHS junior, said.

Golding gives vivid expressions when he writes the lines of kids as they really would mispronounce. “Sucks to your ass-mar” is one of them because it is not ass-mar, but asthma. It would make you imagine the kid saying that.

I highly recommend you to read this book as you would learn many things and it has amazing story. Also, after you read this novel, you might realize the meaning of the title, Lord of the Flies.