Lord of the Flies? What Really Happened When Six Boys Were Stranded on a Deserted Island
If you’ve attended school during the last half century, you likely know the story: Supposedly civilized schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island, organize and make plans to survive, but soon descend into barbarity, warfare, and murder as the “beast” within asserts its primal influence.
That’s the fictional tale presented in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), anyway, considered by many to be one of the 20th century’s great novels. But the real story of what happened when a group of boys was stranded on a deserted island, just 11 years after the book’s publication, is quite different. It’s an amazing, touching story of not just survival, but also faith, kindness, resolve, and discipline. In fact, it can make you wonder whether Lord of the Flies (LOTF) had as much “to do with Golding’s twisted psyche,” as American Thinker’s Andrea Widburg put it, as with anything reflecting man’s nature or modern civilization.
As Widburg wrote in May, “Golding’s book is in the news again because an article in The Guardian looks at ‘The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.’ It turns out that nice boys, raised in a traditional Christian environment, survive surprisingly well.”
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