On several occasions Stephen King mention Lord of the flies as a good book. Additionally, in Audible, the book is cited as an example of a good successful reading by the author. So I listened to the audio and read the book at the same time.

Golding says he wrote about boys because has been a son, a brother, a father, a grandfather, but never a sister or a daughter, and that he thinks that boys are more representative of society than girls. I disagree but tthat’s what he said. He starts describing a bunch of kids without adults in an island, drawing likely by his own experiences as an aristocrat schoolboy ,but the perspective of a grandfather is not the perspective of a child, and the story quickly drifts from a boy’s fantasy to the symbolic questioning of human nature.

According to Golding,

“the theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but, enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island… And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?”

The title “Lord of the flies” is a translation of the Hebrew Ba´alzevuv, a devil whose name suggests decay, destruction, demoralization, and panic. Golding´s Beelzebub is the anarchic, amoral driving force whose function seems to insure the survival of the individual. The tenets of civilization and intelligence from a veneer over the fury and the mire of human veins.

Nonetheless, Golding says that he does not know really where the story comes from and advices the reader that his own interpretation is the right one, even above that of the writer.