The Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel by Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding. It discusses how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British school-boys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results.
The title is said to be a reference to the Hebrew name Beelzebub (בעל זבוב, Ba'al-zvuv, "god of the fly", "host of the fly" or literally "Lord of Flies"), a name sometimes used as a synonym for Satan.
The book was written during the first years of the Cold War and the atomic age; the events arise in the context of an unnamed nuclear war. The boys whose actions form the superficial subject of the book are from a school in Great Britain. Some are ordinary students; some arrive as an already-coherent body under an established leader (the choir). The book portrays their descent into savagery, contrasting with other books that had lauded the inevitable ascendancy of a higher form of human nature, as in Two Years' Vacation of Jules Verne (1888). Although Verne's ideas are influenced by scientism and optimism, Golding, like George Orwell, was disillusioned with socialism, and horrified by the barbarity of Joseph Stalin's regime. Left to themselves in an edenic country, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.
At an allegorical level, the main theme is the conflicting impulses towards civilization (live by rules, peacefully and in harmony), and towards the will to power.[citation needed] Other themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, forms a major subtext of the story. 

lord of the flies symbolism