The Coral Island Lord Of The Flies Essay

In the year 1858 Robert Michael Ballantyne released a novel called The Coral Island, in the story, a small group of boys are stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean and are left to survive with each other until eventually they fight their way back to a proper civilization. In the 1950’s an author named William Golding read that story and believed that that wouldn’t be what would happen to a group of boys with no adults, so he wrote his own take on the story in a novel called Lord of the Flies. In Lord of the Flies a group of boys are stranded on a lively island rich in the resources that they need to survive and because one of the boys has a father with some significance in the Navy, they also have a potential to be rescued quickly. The boys really have no concerns on the island except each other. This is where Golding’s story takes a turn for the worse. In his story some of the boys begin to turn on each other and fight leading to the eventual death of some boys and the ultimate destruction of the island. This ending happened because Golding had the fundamental belief that at every person’s core they are evil and that without civilization that evil comes to light. Throughout the story, the children lose their …show more content…
William Golding most likely read Ballantyne’s novel and believed that the events of The Coral Island wouldn’t happen as were written. At the time, The Coral Island was also a standard book that all British schoolchildren had to read. Golding believed that every British child shouldn’t have to read a book that he deemed incorrect so he wrote his own story and even borrowed characters’ names from The Coral Island just so the stories would be compared. Of course Golding did write the story his own way. With the puerile idea that all people are evil, and that when civilization fell, that evil would truly show