William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: Stories of lost boys, without adult supervision, on islands where time stands still

The ending of Lord of the Flies, “Ralph wept for…the darkness of man’s heart” (1, p. 285), is misleading. For it is silly to conclude anything about “man’s heart” based on a story of young boys. Their brains are not fully developed.

To understand Lord of the Flies, it helps to compare it to a similar story, Peter Pan. Both stories are about lost boys on an island, who have no adult supervision. One has a “beast,” the other has a crocodile. One has a tribe of bloodthirsty hunters, the other has bloodthirsty pirates. Both islands are magical places where time stands still.

In Peter Pan, it is directly stated that Peter and the lost boys, as long as they live on the island, will never grow up. In Lord of the Flies, the same thing is implied, since there is almost no reference to the boys’ growing up, or being likely to grow up, while on this island. For example, the question is never raised as to whether the face-painting, bloodthirsty hunters would be likely to still be interested in that in six months. To conclude anything about “man’s heart” from this story, you would have to assume that all or most of these boys, psychologically and morally speaking, will never grow up.

Now, jokes aside, most boys do grow up. The only “children” who never grow up are the child-aged alternate personalities of adults who have multiple personality. Child-aged alters are very common in adults with multiple personality, and they are child-aged because they arose when the person was a child and are frozen in time.

So when I read stories about children on magical islands where time stands still, I suspect that the characters are based on the author’s child-aged alters.

1. William Golding. Lord of the Flies. Introduction by Stephen King. New York, Perigee, 1954/2011.