In the following excerpt, Niemeyer compares Lord of the Flies to an earlier, utopian British children' s novel, The Coral Island.
One interested in finding about Golding for oneself should probably begin with Lord of the Flies. ... The story is simple. In a way not clearly explained, a group of children, all boys, presumably evacuees in a future war, are dropped from a plane just before it is destroyed, on to an uninhabited tropical Island. The stage is thus set for a reworking of a favorite subject in children's literature: castaway children assuming adult responsibilities without adult supervision. Golding expects his readers to recall the classic example of such a book, R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), where the boys rise to the occasion and behave as admirably as would adults. But m.....
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