I think you are the first person I've ever encountered that didn't hate it, and basically everyone even in the neighborhood of my age read it in school.
The common thread here is that they read it in school. I automatically hated almost every single book I was ever assigned in high school.
I think I've managed to make it work for at least some of the kiddos I've had over the last two years. Some of them have told me that they enjoyed the book.
I love Lord of the Flies, I thought it's a really interesting story, full of incredible symbolism.
I'd really like to see a remake done with a bunch of girls instead of boys.
It's nice that the symbols are so clearly drawn that the kiddos don't need to guess forever. They're fairly straightforward. Makes 'em easier to teach.
We've had a few discussions about what an all-girls island might have done differently.
I didn't much like it because the "humans are $&$#$@&$s" message had all the subtlety of a freight train.
Couple of different things going on.
In
Lord of the Flies, every boy has the capacity for good
and evil. It's not that "humans are $&$#$@&$s", unless you think that acknowledging any evil at all implies that "humans are $&$#$@&$s", which, well, I can't help you there.
Golding frames the story as a struggle between lawless, capricious authoritarianism and rules-bound democracy. He clearly thinks democracy is better. Jack's regime rests on terror, murder, and theft, and it burns the whole island down. Ralph's democracy, while deeply flawed, is the best protection that the likes of Piggy and the littluns have against the casual brutality of Jack and his thugs. Piggy understands that quite well; he clings to the conch as a talisman of protection long after the other biguns join Jack, and long after it has ceased to mean anything, because the rules are all he's got. He has the conch; he has the right to speak. That matters so much to him that it's all he brings to his final showdown with Jack and the hunters. He dies with it in his hands.
Golding presents democracy as something worth defending to the death.
People made democracy, too. People make rules to protect those who can't protect themselves. That doesn't really fit with "humans are $&$#$@&$s".
The book does have a fairly pessimistic tone to it. It is, after all, basically about World War II (although it's set during World War III). But I don't think that the
themes are particularly pessimistic, if that makes sense.
I prefer to think of its message not as "humans are $&$#$@&$s" but rather "elite British boarding schools train children to be $&$#$@&$s." The children were nothing like humans raised in a state of nature with parents familiar with the environment and characters worth emulating, but were the product of a highly authoritarian system design to train up a ruling class.
Golding does seem to have some things to say about the system that produces British schoolboys; he was part of that system, after all. But the same system that produced Jack Merridew - who's Head Boy and chapter chorister, who can sing C sharp, and whose thugs murder two human beings on the island, attempt the murder of a third, and torture several others - also produced Piggy and Simon. Perhaps he's saying something about achievement and adolescent male leadership roles in the public school system, but that doesn't lead quite so neatly to the situation that prevails on the island. Would the island have turned into such a disaster without Jack and his private army of choir boys?
Golding's sights are set higher than just the turn-of-the-century public schools. It's not just the boys who screw up in
Lord of the Flies.
BTW: Lord of the Flies is one of the ultimate low-budget motion pictures. Funds were so low, a screenwriter was out of the question. The producers passed out copies of the paperback instead.
The makers of the 1963 film also used false pretenses to get their kids onto the island and housed them in miserable conditions during filming. And the movie is garbage.
Yes, part of Lord of the Flies is how they're choir boys, they're supposed to be like the cream of civilization.
They aren't just choir boys. Jack and the choir are an
internationally renowned choir. They have performed in Addis Ababa and Gibraltar. (Weird places, but roll with them.)
Golding makes the contrast particularly sharp when Jack gathers his hunters for the first time after leaving Ralph's group, when he describes their savage appearance but slips in that once their voices had been the "song of angels". And then, later, on Castle Rock, Ralph and Piggy confront them with logic and reason and their only response is "silvery laughter", like the chime of bells.
