I read Lord of the Flies as part of my Nobel literature project. I checked out the e-book from my local library and read it at the end of my travel in Europe this summer. I finished it in CDG waiting for my flight back home. Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983, the year I was born, but Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, the year my mother was born.
I had somehow avoided the book in high school, although the basic idea has permeated the culture enough that I kind of knew what was coming. The book was intense for me. Several times while I was reading it at night, I’d have to stop and switch over to a Sherlock Holmes mystery to cool down so I could sleep. When I finished it, I felt physically drained. My first thought after finishing was, “They let kids read that?” I found it deeply upsetting and disturbing, and I don’t know if I could have handled it when I was younger.
On the other hand, perhaps I could have handled it better when I was younger, before I knew how cruel the world really is. Perhaps the senseless violence and chaos would have seemed so outlandish as to be unreal to me. But it is not unreal to me now.
I wasn’t drawn in to the characters very quickly in the book, but by the last 40 or 50 pages, my jaw was clenched, and I was praying for any kind of Deus ex machina to come rescue them. It would not have been as good a piece of literature if help had come sooner, but I wouldn’t have cared.
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