😱 SURVIVAL GONE WRONG: ONE OF THE MOST DISTURBING STORIES EVER PUT ON SCREEN—SCHOOLBOYS STRANDED ON A DESERTED ISLAND DESCEND INTO CHAOS 💥

Lord of the Flies has received a new adaptation as a miniseries on Netflix, finally giving the content enough time to deliver its full impact, which movie adaptations often don’t allow due to their shorter runtimes. Because Lord of the Flies is based on William Golding’s novel of the same name, the controversial nature of Golding’s story is revisited in modern conversations through the new adaptation, even though 72 years have passed since the book’s release.

The themes and violent content in Golding’s novel have led to its being banned numerous times since its release. Its ending, in particular, has been the source of countless debates, especially because of the world events mentioned in Lord of the Flies butnot focused on to avoid overshadowing the boys’ struggle to survive.

How Lord of the Flies’ Setting Invites Controversial Opinions

The main theme in Lord of the Flies is human nature. The novel attempts to explore the truth about human nature, specifically whether humans are inherently good, evil, or neither.

At the beginning, Golding positioned the boys as examples that society, democracy, and human decency would prevail in extreme circumstances. They quickly vote for a leader and decide on the rules of their new mini-society to survive. This initial setup falls apart as quickly as it forms when Jack (Lox Pratt) rebels against Ralph (Winston Sawyers) and recruits other boys to hunt and kill Ralph.

As the dynamics of the cast shift into two rival groups rather than a democracy working together, the controversial nature of Golding’s novel is revealed. The plot becomes a survival-of-the-fittest story that argues humans become savages when freed from society’s rules.

The Ironic Ending of Lord of the Flies Solidifies Its Themes

Image via Netflix

At the end of Lord of the Flies, the boys are about to fully embrace the savage nature they’ve been showing by killing Ralph, but rescue arrives before they go through with the act. A naval officer asks the boys if they were playing war, which aligns with the overarching theme that the boys see most events as games.

They played at making a society, and then they played a deadly game of cat and mouse. The officer asks about the state of the boys, and Ralph informs him that two of his friends have died, but that he’s uncertain about the total number of deaths, believing there are more than those he knows about.

The officer criticizes Ralph’s leadership, believing that he should’ve known how many children needed to be rescued if he was the leader. The officer’s criticisms and his minimization of the boys’ savagery are meant to be ironic. As a naval officer, he would likely be involved in the ongoing war, which means he could be said to be playing war as well.

That war is the reason the boys ended up stranded on the island— and therefore why some have died— because the plane they were on was part of a wartime evacuation, making the war started by adults like the officer who was criticizing them the direct cause of their ordeal. By the end of the novel and its adaptations, you see the parallels that Golding worked to build.

Most of the threats the boys faced were created by them, and that’s likely the case for the war in the background as well. The officer criticizes Ralph’s leadership, but it was the military leaders who ordered the evacuation, which forced Ralph to become a leader. The parallels between the boys and the war being waged offer an uncomfortable look at human nature in Lord of the Flies, solidifying its reputation as controversial.