himself, his refusal to confront his own nature, that the sow's head symbolizes and Golding excoriates. What finally happens to Simon the saviour the four paragraphs closing Chapter Nine relate, in detailing the disposition of Simon's body. These paragraphs emphasize the material assimilation of the corpse back into the material universe. It is true that the last glimpse Golding provides of the body is that of its drifting "out to sea," in the ancient symbolic act of the soul's "crossing over," but the absence of evidence that Simon is to have a conscious afterlife, that he will remain in any way intact as a person, makes the decorporealization seem very permanent. The body glows ironically, with the luminescence of scavengers, metamorphosing it into the subhuman world of ragged claws. Even as Simon's body is seen, at the close of Chapter Nine, to be a "silver form under the steadfast constellations" (the body to disintegrate, the stars to prevail), the intimations of immortality are quite evanescent. The romantic metaphor of its becoming a star obviates the urgent practicalities of the Christian's "getting into heaven," Simon's soul (breath-spirit) leaves him with a last gruesome "plop." At best the prospect seems to be the certainly non-Christian one of Simon's disembodied spirit's remaining forever disembodied. The drift of these paragraphs of Lord of the Flies seems to counter the Christian anticipation of an eventual hylozoic reunion of human body and soul. And though the reader's sympathies yearn that the beauty of Simon's spirit preclude its extinction, that beauty in the end only makes the oblivion Simon comes to more poignant. The Coral Island Revisited1 CARL NIEMEYER ONE interested in finding out about Golding for oneself should probably begin with Lord of the Flies, now available in a paperback. The story is simple. In a way not clearly explained, a group of children, all boys, presumably evacuees in a future war, are dropped from a plane just before it is destroyed, onto an uninhabited tropical island. The stage is thus set for a reworking of a favorite subject in children's literature: castaway children assuming adult responsibilities without adult supervision. Golding expects his readers to recall the classic example of such a book, R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857),2 where the boys rise to the occasion and behave as admirably as would adults. But in Lord of the Flies everything goes wrong from the beginning. A few boys representing sanity and common sense, led by Ralph and Piggy, see the necessity for maintaining a signal fire to attract a rescue. But they are thwarted by the hunters, led by red-haired Jack, whose lust for blood is finally not to be satisfied by killing merely wild pigs. Only the timely arrival of a British cruiser saves us from an ending almost literally too horrible to think about Since Golding is using a naive literary form to express sophisticated reflections on the nature of man and society, and since he refers obliquely 1.This article appeared in College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-45, and is reprinted here in slightly shortened form by permission of the National Council of the Teachers of English and the author. 2.It is worthwhile to compare Frank Kermode's discussion of The Coral Island with Niemeyer's. See "The Novels of William Golding," reprinted in this volume on pp. 203-206. See also the Foreword to this volume.-Eds. to Ballantyne many times throughout the book, a glance at The Coraf Island is appropriate. Ballantyne shipwrecks his three boys-Jack, eighteen; Ralph, the narrator, aged fifteen; and Peterkin Gay, a comic sort of boy, aged thirteen-somewhere in the South Seas on an uninhabited coral island. Jack is a natural leader, but both Ralph and Peterkin have abilities valuable for survival. Jack has the most common sense and foresight, but Peterkin turns out to be a skillful killer of pigs, and Ralph, when later in the book he is temporarily separated from his friends and alone on a schooner, coolly navigates it back to Coral Island by dead reckoning, a feat sufficiently impressive, if not quite equal to Captain Bligh's. The boys' life on the island is idyllic; and they are themselves without malice or wickedness, though there are a few curious episodes in which Ballantyne seems to hint at something he himself understands as little as do his characters. One is Peterkin's wanton killing of an old sow, useless as food, which the boy rationalizes by saying he needs leather for shoes, This and one or two other passages suggest that Ballantyne was aware of some darker aspects of boyish nature, but for the most part he emphasizes the paradisiacal life of the happy castaways. Like Golding's, however, Ballantyne's story raises the problem of evil, but whereas Golding finds evil in the boys own natures, it comes to Ballantyne's boys not from within themselves but from the outside world. Tropical nature, to be sure, is kind, but the men of this non-Christian world are bad. For example, the island is visited by savage cannibals, one canoeful pursuing another, who fight a cruel and bloody battle, observed by the horrified boys, and then go away. A little later the island is again visited, this time by pirates (i.e., white men who have renounced or scorned their Christian heritage), who succeed in capturing Ralph. In due time the pirates are deservedly destroyed, and in the final episode of the book the natives undergo an unmotivated conversion to Christianity, which effects a total change in their nature just in time to rescue the boys from their clutches. Thus Ballantyne's view of man is seen to be optimistic, like his view of English boys' pluck and resourcefulness, which subdues tropical islands as triumphantly as England imposes empire and religion on lawless breeds of men. Colding`s naval officer, the deus ex machine, of Lord of theFlies, is only echoing Ballantyne when, perceiving dimly that all has not gone well on the island, he says (p. 186): "I should have thought that a pack of British boys-you're all British, aren't you?-would have been able to put up a better show than that-I mean-" This is not the only echo of the older book. Golding boldly calls his two chief characters Jack and Ralph. He reproduces the comic Peterkin in the person of Piggy.3 He has a wanton killing of a wild pig, accomplished, as E. L. Epstein points out, "in terms of sexual intercourse."4 He uses a storm to avert a quarrel between Jack and Ralph, as Ballantyne used a hurricane to rescue his boys from death at the hands of cannibals. He emphasizes physical cruelty but integrates it into his story, and by making it a real if deplorable part of human, or at least boyish, nature improves on Ballantyne, whose descriptions of brutality-never of course performed by the boys-are usually introduced merely for their sensational effect. Finally, on the last page Golding's officer calls Ralph mildly to task for not having organized things better. "It was like that at first," said Ralph, "before things-" He stopped. "We were together then-" The officer nodded helpfully. I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island." Golding invokes Ballantyne, so that the kind but uncomprehending adult, the instrument of salvation, may recall to the child who has just gone through hell the naivete of the child's own early innocence, now forever lost; but he suggests at the same time the inadequacy of Ballantyne's picture of human nature in primitive surroundings. Golding, then, regards Ballantyne's book as a badly falsified map of reality, yet the only map of this particular reality that many of us have. Ralph has it and, through harrowing experiences, replaces it with a more accurate one. The naval officer, though he should know better, since he is on 3.Golding has declared that Peterkin of The Coral Island becomes Simon in Lord of the Flies. See Frank Kermode and William Golding, The Meaning of It AH," p. 201.-Eds. 4.E. L. Epstein, "Notes on Lord of the Flies," p. 280 below.- Eds. the scene and should not have to rely on memories of his boyhood reading, has it, and it seems unlikely that he is ever going to alter it, for his last recorded action is to turn away from the boys and look at his "trim" cruiser; in other words to turn away from a revelation of the untidy human heart to look at something manufactured, manageable, and solidly useful. Golding, who being a grammar school teacher should know boys well, gives a corrective of Ballantyne's optimism. As he has explained, the book is "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." 5 These defects turn out, on close examination, to result from the evil of inadequacy and mistakenness. Evil is not the positive and readily identifiable force it appears to be when embodied in Ballantyne's savages and pirates. Golding's Ralph, for example, has real abilities, most conspicuous among them the gift of leadership and a sense of responsibility toward the "littluns." Yet both are incomplete. "By now," writes Golding, "Ralph had no self-consciousness in public thinking but would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess." Such detachment is obviously an important and valuable quality in a leader, but significantly the next sentence reads: "The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player" (p. 108). Piggy on the other hand no doubt would have been a good chess player, for with a sense of responsibility still more acute than Ralph's he combines brains and common sense. Physically, however, he is ludicrous-fat, asthmatic, and almost blind without his specs. He is forever being betrayed by his body. At his first appearance he is suffering from diarrhea; his last gesture is a literally brainless twitch of the limbs, 'like a pig's after it has been killed" (p. 167). His further defect is that he is powerless, except as he works through Ralph. Though Piggy is the first to recognize the value of the conch and even shows Ralph how to blow it to summon the first assembly, he cannot sound it himself. And he lacks imagination. Scientifically minded as he is, he scorns what is intangible and he dismisses the possibility of ghosts or an imaginary beast. " 'Cos things wouldn't make sense. Houses an' streets, an'-TV- they wouldn't work" (p. 85). Of course he is quite right, 5. Quoted by Epstein, p. 277.-Eds. save that he forgets he is now on an island where the artifacts of the civilization he has always known are meaningless. It is another important character, Simon, who understands that there may indeed be a beast, even if not a palpable one-"maybe it's only us" (p. 82). The scientist Piggy has recognized it is possible to be frightened of people (p. 78), but he finds this remark of Simon's dangerous nonsense. Still Simon is right, as we see from his interview with the sow's head on a stake, which is the lord of the flies. He is right that the beast is in the boys themselves, and he alone discovers that what has caused their terror is in reality a dead parachutist ironically stifled in the elaborate clothing worn to guarantee survival. But Simon's failure is the inevitable failure of the mystic-what he knows is beyond words; he cannot impart his insights to others. Having an early glimpse of the truth, he cannot tell it. Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express man-kind's essential illness. Inspiration came to him. "What's the dirtiest thing there is?" As an answer Jack dropped into the uncomprehending silence that followed it the one crude expressive syllable. Release was like an orgasm. Those littluns who had climbed back on the twister fell off again and did not mind. The hunters were screaming with delight. Simon's effort fell about him in ruins; the laughter beat him cruelly and he shrank away defenseless to his seat (p. 82). Mockery also greets Simon later when he speaks to the lord of the flies, though this time it is sophisticated, adult mockery: "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!" said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter (p. 133). Tragically, when Simon at length achieves a vision so clear that it is readily communicable he is killed by the pig hunters in their insane belief that he is the very evil which he alone has not only understood but actually exorcised. Lake the martyr, he is killed for being precisely what he is not. The inadequacy of Jack is the most serious of all, and here perhaps if anywhere in the novel we have a personification of absolute evil. Though he is the most mature of the boys (he alone of all the characters is given a last name), and though as head of the choir he is the only one with any experience of leadership, he is arrogant and lacking in Ralph's charm and warmth. Obsessed with the idea of hunting, he organizes his choir members into a band of killers. Ostensibly they are to kill pigs, but pigs alone do not satisfy them, and pigs are in any event not needed for food. The blood lust once aroused demands nothing less than human blood. If Ralph represents purely civil authority, backed only by his own good will, Piggy's wisdom, and the crowd's easy willingness to be ruled, Jack stands for naked ruthless power, the police force or the military force acting without restraint and gradually absorbing the whole state into itself and annihilating what it cannot absorb. Yet even Jack is inadequate. He is only a little boy after all, as we are sharply reminded in a brilliant scene at the end of the book, when we suddenly see him through the eyes of the officer instead of through Ralph's (pp. 185-87), and he is, like all sheer power, anarchic. When Ralph identifies himself to the officer as "boss," Jack, who has just all but murdered him, makes a move in dispute, but overawed at last by superior power, the power of civilization and the British Navy, implicit in the officer's mere presence, he says nothing. He is a villain (Are his red hair and ugliness intended to suggest that he is a devil?), but in our world of inadequacies and imperfections even villainy does not fulfill itself completely. If not rescued, the hunters would have destroyed Ralph and made him, like the sow, an offering to the beast; but the inexorable logic of Ulysses makes us understand that they would have proceeded thence to self-destruction. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. The distance we have traveled from Ballantyne's cheerful unrealities is both artistic and moral Golding is admittedly symbolic; Ballantyne professed to be telling a true story. Yet it is the symbolic tale that, at least for our times, carries conviction. Golding's boys, who choose to remember nothing of their past before the plane accident; who, as soon as Jack commands the choir to take off the robes marked with the cross of Christianity, have no trace of religion; who demand to be ruled and are incapable of being ruled properly; who though many of them were once choir boys (Jack could sing C sharp) never sing a note on the island; in whose minds the great tradition of Western culture has left the titles of a few books for children, a knowledge of the use of matches (but no matches), and hazy memories of planes and TV sets-these boys are more plausible than Ballantyne's. His was a world of blacks and whites: bad hurricanes, good islands; good pigs obligingly allowing themselves to be taken for human food, bad sharks disobligingly taking human beings for shark food; good Christians, bad natives; bad pirates, good boys. Of the beast within, which demands blood sacrifice, first a sow's head, then a boy's, Ballantyne has some vague notion, but he cannot take it seriously. Not only does Golding see the beast; he sees that to keep it at bay we have civilization; but when by some magic or accident civilization is abolished and the human animal is left on his own, dependent upon his mere humanity, then being human is not enough. The beast appears, though not necessarily spontaneously or inevitably, for it never rages in Ralph or Piggy or Simon as it does in Roger or Jack; but it is latent in all of them, in the significantly named Piggy, in Ralph, who sometimes envies the abandon of the hunters (p. 69) and who shares the desire to "get a handful" of Robert's "brown, vulnerable flesh" (p. 106), and even in Simon burrowing into his private hiding place. After Simon's death Jack attracts all the boys but Ralph and the loyal Piggy into his army. Then when Piggy is killed and Ralph is alone, only civilization can save him. The timely arrival of the British Navy is less theatrical than logically necessary to make Golding's point. For civilization defeats the beast. It slinks back into the jungle as the boys creep out to be rescued; but the beast is real It is there, and it may return. "A World of Violence and Small Boys"1 J. T. C. GOLDING PROBABLY he will agree that his real education was picked up, almost by the way, at home. In those days when the radio was non-existent and the cost of gramophones prohibitive the only local music was the town band. Bill was lucky that Mom was good enough to accompany Dad through Handel, Mozart and others. They were often joined by an ex-bandmaster of the Coldstream Guards. The walls of that small front room are probably vibrating still. Bill, as a small boy, was terribly affected by Tosti's "Good-bye." There was painting. Dad's own paintings of scenery in Wiltshire and Cornwall hung on the walls and there were a couple of books of cheap reprints of the great ones. There were books. Chief among them was the Children's Encyclopaedia and of course Dad had access to the School Library.2 Bill was disappointed when he got to school to find he'd read most of the library. It was a small one. One book that was read and re-read was Nat the Naturalisf, by George Manville Fenn. The scene was set somewhere in the jungle in South East Asia. Bill could quote whole pages by heart and it often accompanied him to the top of 1.The following is an excerpt from a letter by J. T. C. Golding (William Golding's brother) addressed to James R. Baker on December 4, 1962. The letter appears here by permission of J. T. C. Golding and James R. Baker. 2. William Golding's father was Senior Master of Marlborough Grammar School.-Eds. the chestnut tree in the garden.3 And all the time there was a father only too willing to give a logical answer to a small boy's questions. Eventually he entered Marlborough Grammar School and emerged from a pretty sheltered life into a world of violence and small boys-and not-so-small boys. Here he met physical violence and the deliberate infliction of pain by boys. Also he noticed the tendency of small boys to gang up against the weak or those with a mannerism that put them out of step.4 Not that it was a bad school for bullying- official policy was hot against it and in any case Bill was physically well-equipped enough to look after himself. Many others will have noticed all this but the effect, in this case, on an impressionable ten-year-old may have had important results. The conjunction of the boy in the jungle in Nat the Naturalist and the school playground may have lain dormant for years until some later experience pushed it to the surface as Lord of the Flies. On the other hand the explanation is so obvious and easy that it probably isn't true. During these last years at school another writer, I think of considerable importance to him, entered his life. This was Mark Twain. Not Mark Twain of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but of Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. He swallowed these almost as completely as he had done Nat the Naturalist. The humour of these books and their irreverence towards many accepted things encour- 3. The symbolic significance of this tree is made clear in Golding's autobiographical essay, "The Ladder and the Tree," The Listener, 63 (March 24, 1960), 531-33). The essay is vital to an understanding of the basic dialectic which is dramatized in all the novels: the conflict between the rational and the irrational elements in man's nature and the effects of this conflict on both the individual and historical levels.-Eds. 4. The "tendency" is obvious enough in Lord of the Flies: note Simon's position in Jack's chorus, Roger's attack on the "litthins," and the general abuse of Piggy. After fear drives most of the boys into the hunter tribe, they lose all capacity for dialectic and begin sadistic persecution of those who stand outside their powerful group. In Free Fall a similar pattern of behavior appears in the episodes which describe the rough-and-tumble boyhood adventures of Sammy Mountjoy.-Eds. aged his own scepticism. It was an attitude he was already adopting toward the society of 4000 people around him. In addition he had a father who welcomed criticism of any institution under the sun, though any deviation in personal conduct produced a muted rumble of thunder. The Fables of William Golding1 JOHN PETER A useful critical distinction may be drawn between a fiction and a fable. Like most worthwhile distinctions it is often easy to detect, less easy to define. The difficulty arises because the clearest definition would be in terms of an author's intentions, his pre-verbal procedures, and these are largely inscrutable and wholly imprecise. For a definition that is objective and specific we are reduced to an "as if," which is at best clumsy and at worst perhaps delusive. The distinction itself seems real enough. Fables are those narratives which leave the impression that their purpose was anterior, some initial thesis or contention which they are apparently concerned to embody and express in concrete terms. Fables always give the impression that they were preceded by the conclusion which it is their function to draw, though of course it is doubtful whether any author foresees his conclusions as fully as this, and unlikely that his work would be improved if he did. The effect of a fiction is very different. Here the author's aim, as it appears from what he has written, is evidently to present a more or less faithful reflection of the complexities, and often of the irrelevancies, of life as it is actually experienced. Such conclusions as he may draw-he is under much less compulsion to draw them than a writer of fables-do not appear to be anterior but on the contrary take their origin from the fiction itself, in which they are latent, and occasionally unrecognized. It is a matter of approach, so far as that can be 1. This article first appeared in the Kenyon Review, 19 (Autumn, 1957), 577-592. It is reprinted in part here through the courtesy of the Kenyon Review and the author. gauged. Fictions make only a limited attempt to generalize and explain the experience with which they deal, since their concern is normally with the uniqueness of this experience. Fables, starting from a skeletal abstract, must flesh out that abstract with the appearances of "real life" in order to render it interesting and cogent. 1984 is thus an obvious example of a fable, while The Rainbow is a fiction. Orwell and Lawrence, in these books, are really moving in opposite directions. If their movements could be geometrically projected to exaggerate and expose each other, Lawrence's would culminate in chaotic reportage, Orwell's in stark allegory. . . . [The distinction] has a particular value for the critic whose concern is with novels, in that it assists him in locating and defining certain merits which are especially characteristic of novels and certain faults to which they are especially prone. Both types, the fiction and the fable, have their own particular dangers. The danger that threatens a fiction is simply that it will become confused, so richly faithful to the complexity of human existence as to lose all its shape and organization. . . . The danger that threatens a fable is utterly different, in fact the precise opposite. When a fable is poor-geometrically projected again-it is bare and diagrammatic, insufficiently clothed in its garment of actuality, and in turn its appeal is extra-aesthetic and narrow. Satires like Animal Farm are of this kind. It will be said that any such distinction must be a neutral one, and that the best novels are fictions which have managed to retain their due share of the fable's coherence and order. No doubt this is true. But it also seems to be true that novels can go a good deal farther', without serious damage, in the direction of fiction than they can in the direction of fable, and this suggests that fiction is a much more congenial mode for the novelist than fable can ever be. The trouble with the mode of fable is that it is constricting. As soon as a novelist has a particular end in view the materials from which he may choose begin to shrink, and to dispose themselves toward that end. . . . The fact is that a novelist depends ultimately not only on the richness of his materials but on the richness of his interests too; and fable, by tying these to a specific end, tends to reduce both. Even the most chaotic fiction will have some sort of emergent meaning, provided it is a full and viable reflection of the life from which it derives, if only because the unconscious preoccupations of the novelist will help to impart such meaning to it, drawing it into certain lines like iron filing sprinkled in a magnetic field. Fables, however, can only be submerged in actuality with difficulty, and they are liable to bob up again like corks, in all their plain explicit-ness. It may even be true to say that they are best embodied in short stories, where' economy is vital and "pointlessness" (except for its brevity) comparatively intolerable. *** Lord of the Flies, which appeared in 1954, is set on an imaginary South Sea island, and until the last three pages the only characters in it are boys. They have apparently been evacuated from Britain, where an atomic war is raging, and are accidentally stranded on the island without an adult supervisor. The administrative duties of their society (which includes a number of "littluns," aged about six) devolve upon their elected leader, a boy of twelve named Ralph, who is assisted by a responsible, unattractive boy called Piggy, but as time passes an independent party grows up, the "hunters," led by an angular ex-choir leader named Jack Merridew. This party, soon habituated to the shedding of animal blood, recedes farther and farther from the standards of civilization which Ralph and Piggy are straining to preserve, and before very long it is transformed into a savage group of outlaws with a costume and a ritual of their own. In the course of one of their dance-feasts, drunk with tribal excitement, they are responsible for killing the one individual on the island who has a real insight into the problems of their lives, a frail boy called Simon, subject to fainting fits, and after this more or less intentional sacrifice they lose all sense of restraint and become a band of criminal marauders, a threat to everyone on the island outside their own tribe. Piggy is murdered by their self-constituted witch doctor and torturer, the secretive and sinister Roger, and Ralph is hunted by them across the island like the pigs they are accustomed to kill. Before they can kill and decapitate him a naval detachment arrives and takes charge of all the children who have survived. It is obvious that this conclusion is not a concession to readers who require a happy ending-only an idiot will suppose that the book ends happily-but a deliberate device by which to throw the story into focus. With the appearance of the naval officer the bloodthirsty hunters are instantly reduced to a group of painted urchins led by "a little boy who wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap," yet the reduction cannot expunge the knowledge of what they have done and meant to do. The abrupt return to childhood, to insignificance, underscores the argument of the narrative: that Evil is inherent in the human mind itself, whatever innocence may cloak it, ready to put forth its strength as soon as the occasion is propitious. This is Golding's theme, and it takes on a frightful force by being presented in juvenile terms, in a setting that is twice deliberately likened to the sunny Coral Island of R. M. Ballantyne.2 The boys' society represents, in embryo, the society of the adult world, their impulses and convictions are those of adults incisively abridged, and the whole narrative is a powerfully ironic commentary on the nature of Man, an accusation levelled at us all. There are no excuses for complacency in the fretful conscientiousness of Ralph, the leader, nor in Piggy's anxious commonsense, nor are the miscreants made to seem exceptional. When he first encounters a pig, Jack Merridew is quite incapable of harming it, "because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh," and even the delinquent Roger is at first restrained by the taboos of "parents and school and policemen and the law." Strip these away and even Ralph might be a hunter: it is his duties as a leader that save him, rather than any intrinsic virtue in himself.3 Like any orthodox moralist Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon as we permit him to. The intentness with which this thesis is developed leaves 2.A discussion of the relationship between Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island, published in 1857 in England, and Lord of the Flies occurs in Carl Niemeyer's "The Coral Island Revisited," College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-245. Reprinted in this volume, pp. 217-223.-Eds. 3. As an illustration of this argument, note Ralph's actions when the boys attack Robert as the substitute pig, p. 106 and when Simon is killed as the beast, p. 141.-Eds. no doubt that the novel is a fable, a deliberate translation of a proposition into the dramatized terms of art, and as usual we have to ask ourselves how resourceful and complete the translation has been, how fully the, thesis has been absorbed and rendered implicit in the tale as it is told. A writer of fables will heat his story at the fire of his convictions, but when he has finished, the story must glow apart, generating its own heat from within. Golding himself provides a criterion for judgment here, for he offers a striking example of how complete the translation of a statement into plastic terms can be. Soon after their arrival the children develop an irrational suspicion that there is a predatory beast at large on the island. This has of course no real existence, as Piggy for one points out, but to the littluns it is almost as tangible as their castles in the sand, and most of the older boys are afraid they may be right. One night when all are sleeping there is an air battle ten miles above the sea and a parachuted man, already dead, comes drifting down through the darkness, to settle among the rocks that crown the island's only mountain. There the corpse lies unnoticed, rising and falling with the gusts of the wind, its harness snagged on the bushes and its parachute distending and collapsing. When it is discovered and the frightened boys mistake it for the beast, the sequence is natural and convincing, yet the implicit statement is quite unmistakable too. The incomprehensible threat which has hung over them is, so to speak, identified and explained: a nameless figure who is Man himself, the boys' own natures, the something that all humans have in common. This is finely done and needs no further comment, but unhappily the explicit comment has already been provided, in Simon's halting explanation of the beast's identity: "What I mean is ... maybe it's only us." And a little later we are told that "However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick." This over-explicitness is my main criticism of what is in many ways a work of real distinction, and for two reasons it appears to be a serious one. In the first place the fault is precisely that which any fable is likely to incur: the incomplete translation of its thesis into its story so that much remains external and extrinsic, the teller's assertion rather than the tale's enactment before our eyes. In the second place the fault is a persistent one, and cannot easily be discounted or ignored. It appears in expository annotations like this, when Ralph and Jack begin to quarrel: The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled commonsense. Less tolerably, it obtrudes itself in almost everything- thought, action, and hallucination-that concerns the clairvoyant Simon, the "batty" boy who understands "mankind's essential illness," who knows that Ralph will get back to where he came from, and who implausibly converses with the Lord of the Flies. Some warrant is provided for this clairvoyance in Simon's mysterious illness, but it is inadequate. The boy remains unconvincing in himself, and his presence constitutes a standing invitation to the author to avoid the trickiest problems of his method, by commenting too baldly on the issues he has raised. Any writer of fables must find it hard to ignore an invitation or this kind once it exists. Golding has not been able to ignore it, and the blemishes that result impose some serious, though not decisive, limitations on a fiery and disturbing story. Introduction1 IAN GREGOR and MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES The urge to put things into categories seems to satisfy some deep human need and in this matter at least, critics and historians of literature are very human people indeed. A brief glance at the English Literature section of any library catalogue will show what I mean. There we find literature divided up into various lands of writings, and within the kinds we nave historical periods, and within the periods we have groups or movements, and within the groups individuals who write various kinds. . . . Now up to a point of course this sort of classification serves a very useful purpose. We need a map if we are going to do any exploring, and the fact that it is the countryside we have come to enjoy, not the map, doesn't make the map any less necessary. If we take out a map of The Novel we find, if it is a general one, that it falls into three sections-the eighteenth-century novel, the Victorian novel, and the modern novel. And these descriptions point not simply to three centuries, but to decisive changes that have taken place within the form of the novel. These changes are often due to historical circumstances, and sometimes they can be described in terms of the ruling ideas of the age or the literary expectations of the readers, out there are other changes and shifts in fiction which seem to arise from the very nature of the novel itself. A shift of this land may be seen in a useful classification into "fables" and "fictions." It is a little 1. This essay appears as the Introduction to the "School Edition" of Lord of the Flies published by Faber and Faber, Ltd., London, 1962, pp. i-xii. It is reprinted here by permission of Faber and Faber and the authors. difficult to define this difference satisfactorily in the abstract, but it is fairly easy to see what is meant in practice. When, for instance, D. H. Lawrence wrote in one of his letters, "I am doing a novel which I have never grasped. Damn its eyes, here I am at page 145 and I've no notion what it's about . . . it's like a novel in a foreign language which I don't know very well," he was almost certainly occupied in writing a fiction and not a fable. In other words, a fiction is something which takes the form of an exploration for the novelist, even if it lacks the very extreme position which Lawrence describes; the concern is very much with trying to make clear the individuality of a situation, of a person; for these reasons it is extremely difficult to describe a fiction satisfactorily in abstract terms. With a fable, on the other hand, the case is very different Here the writer begins with a general idea-"the world is not the reasonable place we are led to believe," "all power corrupts" -and seeks to translate it into fictional terms. In this kind of writing the interest of the particular detail lies in the way it points to the generalization behind it. It is generally very easy to say what a fable is "about," because the writers whole purpose is to make the reader respond to it in precisely that way. Clear examples of fiction in the way I am using the word would be works like D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers or Emily Bronte's Withering Heights; clear examples of fable, Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Orwell's Animal Farm. But these are extreme works and most novels have elements of both. Oliver Twist, for instance, is certainly a fiction in its portrayal of the intensely imagined criminal world; but it also moves towards fable when ft describes the world of the poorhouse, and the people who finally rescue Oliver from that world, because here Dickens is moved to write primarily by abstract ideas, the educational hardships of children, the wisdom of benevolence. You will notice I said that Oliver Twist "moves towards" fiction, "moves towards" fable, and in this kind of alternation it is typical of many novels which lie between such extreme examples as I mentioned above. Now when we turn to Mr. Golding's Lord of the Flies we find that what is remarkable is that it is a fable and a fiction simultaneously. And I want to devote the remainder of this Introduction to developing that remark. When we first begin to write and talk about Mr. Golding's novel, it is the aspect of fable which occupies our attention. And this is very natural because the book is a very satisfying one to talk about Mr. Golding, our account might run, is examining what human nature is really like if we could consider it apart from the mass of social detail which gives a recognizable feature to our daily lives. That "really" is important and you may want to argue about it, but Mr. Golding's assumption here