The Irony In Golding's Lord Of The Flies

The book Lord of the Flies is open to various interpretations. Many critics regard it as an excellent introduction to fable, myth, and allegory since it embodies features of each. It is a work whose foundation is mythic; it has the moral purpose of fable and the symbolic links of allegory. Some consider it as a Christian parable and Greek tragedy. Still others interpret it with reference to neo-Freudian, Jungian, and Marxian concepts.The author of this thesis believes that Lord of the Flies is a web of ironies, and irony is a major principle of structure in this book. This thesis focuses mainly on the irony in the novel with Wayne C. Booth's theory of irony, and interprets the story in two ways. One way is to find the clues on the basis of the text itself or internal clues, such as the form of marks, scripts, texts and material symbols, and different forms of rhetoric. The other way is to find external clues, which are based on the tension between the rhetorical effect of the novel and outward cultural presumptions.This paper also points out that the ironic playground in the novel works on two levels. First is the level of external irony. This ironic effect is based on the conflicts between the common norms, which are shared by all or most readers and the author's norms, which are intended to be shared. It is easy for the reader to note that Lord of the Flies falls into the genre of island literature. And the beginning of the story reminds us vividly of R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island. However, as the story proceeds, our usual expectations of island literature are overthrown one by one, and the whole book turns out to be a parody of R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island.The story can remind the reader of a Utopian society, in which no one goes hungry and no one is homeless. The boys land on a tropical paradise: bananas, coconuts and...