Interpreting The Theme And Characters Of Lord Of The Flies By Carl Jung's Theory Of The Collective Unconscious

Lord of the Flies was the first novel of William Golding, a prominent British novelist in the 20th century, and added a classic for modern literature. Through the analysis of the loss of a group of boys' innocence, the novel reflects Golding's mediation on human nature and anxiety about humankind's future.Since its publication, Lord of the Flies has attracted academic attention and been interpreted from various perspectives, such as Freudian psychological analysis, Frye's archetypal criticism and Feminism, etc.. A few articles have appeared to interpret it by Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious, but mainly concentrate on archetypal analysis of characters, images and motifs and draw a lopsided and narrow conclusion that human is innately evil, and ignore the good in human nature. The dissertation intends to interpret the novel by the concept and core contents of the collective unconscious to reveal the evil and emphasize the good in human nature, which is the innovation of the dissertation..The dissertation first analyzes the particular setting in which the innate evil nature is activated. To highlight the savage of them, the boys'brutal behaviors are analyzed subsequently. In addition, the dissertation displays the evil and the good in human nature through the analysis of major characters. The novel seems to convey such a view of Golding to warn human beings that human's nature contains the evil and the good, and in a certain circumstance the innate evil will encounter utmost inflation; the outbreak of wars originates from the utmost inflation of mankind's evil nature: though human returned to an Eden-like paradise, human beings would never change their historical tragedies. Meanwhile Golding implicates that civilization does not eliminate human beings' innate evil but constrains it and the future of mankind seems to have a ray of light. Through the specific analysis I hope that readers will abandon the traditional concept of good and evil and re-examine Golding's view on human nature to appreciate Lord of the Flies from a new and dialectical angle.