A Literary Darwinist Interpretation Of The Competition Between Jack And Ralph In Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies is the novel that made its author—William Golding(1911—1993), world-famous and then helped him win the Nobel Prize for literature in1983.Since its publication in1954, it has touched off different genres’ incisive studies on thecharacters’ behaviors in the novel.In the late1990s, some American literature critics and biologists put forward theiropinion of analyzing literature works with the help of Darwin’s evolution theory onceagain. Before long, a new trend of thought called Literary Darwinism came into being.Combining some Darwin’s evolution notions with evolutionary psychology, LiteraryDarwinists treat writers’ creations, characters’ behaviors in texts and readers’ readingas the results of the interactivity between humans’ evolved psychological mechanismsand their objective surroundings. This trend of thought induces two basic motivationsof human behaviors, namely, survival and reproduction.The competitive behaviors of Jack and Ralph in Lord of the Flies are the externalexhibition of their inherent motivations and emotions from beginning to end. And theiractivities are under the control of these motivations and emotions. Simultaneously, themotivations and emotions are always influenced by variations of their objectivesurroundings. Consequently, from the adaptationists’ viewpoint, the novel reflects oneof the main notions of Literary Darwinism, namely, humans’ behaviors are the result ofinteractivity between humans’ internal psychological mechanisms from evolutionaryprocess and their external environment. With the help of some relevant theories ofLiterary Darwinism deriving from Darwin’s theory of evolution and Buss’sevolutionary psychology, the thesis conducts an analysis on the behaviors, causes andresults of the fierce competitions between the two protagonists.According to the analysis in the thesis, we can find that the fierce competitionsembodied in the three behavioral systems of survival, technology/resources and socialrelations do not develop respectively all by their own. Instead, these competitionsintegrate with each other and relate with one another, forming a body of increasinglyintensified conflicts which eventually lead the two protagonists to their dooms.Besides, we cannot neglect the influences of environmental and psychologicalvariations on individual behaviors. Furthermore, the analysis helps us find the realexistence of literature’s biological nature and justifies that literature is also one of theeffective methods adopted by human beings to solve their adaptive problems.