Destruction Caused By Disharmony: An Analysis Of Lord Of The Flies From Ecologism

Lord of the Flies (1954) is William Golding's first published novel of great achievements. With it, Golding wins the 1983 Nobel Prize for literature "for its perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and university of myth and it illuminates the human condition in the world of today".Interpretations and studies of this novel range over symbolism, feminism, Freud's psychoanalysis, Jung's theories of collective unconsciousness and archetype, and other social, political theories, which differ in theories, approaches and conclusions. Here, this thesis is meant to analyze the novel from a view of eco-criticism and explore Golding's ecological views by probing into the relationships among man, woman and nature in modern society represented in this novel. They concern human-nature relations, woman-man relations, and hierarchy relations. In sum, these three-dimension relations together clarify a harmony principle of the novel:human must learn to co-exist more harmoniously with nature, must limit their exploitation of nature and must stop destroying nature by wars and pollution. As previously noted, only by co-existing harmoniously with nature, can humans live a happy, prosperous and civilized life, and can they expect humanity to survive everlastingly.Eco-criticism is meant to "historically dispose how the earthly ecology is influenced by culture". As was said by Donald Worster, a famous ecological ideology researcher, "the origin of the global ecological crisis we are facing today lies not in the ecological system itself, but in our cultural system. To live through the crisis, we must understand the influence of our culture to the nature as clearly as possible....Although historians, critics, anthropologists and philosophers who study the relationship between ecology and culture can not directly motivate cultural revolution, they can help us understand, and this understanding is just the premise of cultural revolution.'In modern times, anthropocentrism has developed into its peak. As a result, the relationship between humans and nature has become extremely worse. Under the guidance of the basic ideology, in the middle of the 19th century, capitalism was developed into imperialism which strained the relationships between human and human, developed countries and undeveloped countries. Consequently, human life becomes mechanical and stifled.This thesis first explores the relationship between human and nature. In different phases of human civilization, the relationship between human and nature changed from the human's depending on, adoring, cooperating, exploiting, and rescanning the nature. However, during the industrial age, some people began to query what a right attitude toward nature should be. And eco-criticism appeared. Through some analysis combining text of Lord of the Flies in this paper, we can see that the novel is a tragedy depicting the disharmony between human and nature, which is meant to reconstruct a harmony relationship between human and nature.Then in chapter two, the loss of woman in the novel is analyzed, and the reasonable explanation is that it is a call for reconstructing relationship between men and women. For a long term in the western society, women are subordinate to men and considered inferior to them. In Lord of the Flies, the tradition of placing women at an unnecessary position in an isolated island novel is inherited to the most. But the real intention of Golding is not to advocate the idea that men oppress women, but to reveal the importance and indispensability of women. In the novel, the sow is a symbol of woman image, which is hunted and killed by the boys, an indication of a tragedy of a woman. And the destruction of the island as the end of the novel implicates that a world without women is doomed to death. This is also a point of view of eco-feminism, a part of eco-criticism, which is also expounded in this chapter.Chapter three analyzes the disharmony of social system influenced by the violence of human to nature. "The history of human's endeavoring to make the nature yield to man is also a story of man's submitting man." This can be connected to colonialism, which is violence opposed by human to human themselves. In Lord of the Flies, the deserted island is depicted into an originally beautiful and peaceful one, but the boys who came to the island gradually began to split and attack the other group, running for power and benefits, at the end burning the island into fire. In eco-critics'point of view, violence to nature will lead to violence to man themselves and heterization of human relationship. The deep values of human that human and nature are not equal can definitely result in the idea that inequality should exist among humans. Therefore, to eliminate the heterization relationship among human brought about by colonialism and andropocentrism, ecological idea must be embedded and motivated.The innovation of this thesis lies in that the analysis of the classical novel, Lord of the Flies, is carried out from eco-criticism. Through analyzing causes of the destruction of the desert island in Lord of the Flies, the ecological and eco-feminism idea implied in the novel and the strong social critical meanings are revealed. In today's world where ecological crisis has evoked people's attention and becomes even more violent, it is important for us to borrow ideas of ecology, arouse focus on the ecological ideology and eliminate ecological crisis we are facing.