Harmony And Conflicts: An Interpretation Of Lord Of The Flies From The Perspective Of Ethical Literary Criticism

William Golding,known as a fabulist,is one of the most famous British novelists.Golding is renowned for the unique,plain and dignified language style of his works.He expresses the powerlessness of man in the modern world with an unique artistic form.The Lord of the Flies is Golding’s masterpiece,which describes a story about the survival of a group of children stranded on a desert island because of a plane crash after a nuclear war in the future world.Lord of the Flies as the research object and with the method of ethical literary criticism,the harmony and conflicts between man and nature,ethical order,and the ethical selections of the characters in the novel are explored.Different ethical selections the children made show a series of contradictions and conflicts,such as civilization and barbarism,rationality and irrationality,human factor and animal factor,and reveal the fragility of civilization and rationality,as well as the difficulty of pursuing democratic order.This thesis consists of three parts:introduction,main body and conclusion.The first part is introduction,briefly introducing the main content of William Golding and the background and main plots of his novel Lord of the Flies,and summarizing the research status of this novel at home and abroad.After sorting out the theoretical basis of the thesis,that is,the theory of ethical literary criticism,the research methods and significance of this thesis are presented.The main body of the thesis is composed of three chapters,from chapter two to chapter four.In the novel,the competition between Ralph and Jack for leadership is the main contradiction of the story.Around this main ethical line,the novel shows a series of scenes of harmony and contradictions.Firstly,the harmony and conflicts between man and nature in the story are analyzed in chapter two.Golding paved the way for the destiny of the children by describing the changes in the relationship between man and nature.The children who first arrived on the desert island developed from being in harmony with the nature to ignoring and destroying it,and ultimately causing the morbidity of the natural environment.Secondly,the process of the ethical order from establishment to destruction in the novel is expounded in chapter three.The construction of the harmonious ethical order is manifested in the establishment of leadership,the release of distress signal and the establishment of rules and order;the presence of beasts,Simon’s tragic death and the collapse of democratic civilization have exerted profound impact on the children’s ethical selections and indicate that life on the island has fallen into ethical chaos,and the harmonious ethical order is heading for destruction,laying the foundation for the subsequent ethical selections and tragedy of the children.Thirdly,the ethical selections made by the main characters such as Ralph,Jack and Piggy in the context of harmony and conflicts are explained in chapter four.Based on the influence of the Sphinx factor on ethical selection,different ethical selections of the children undergoing a clash between human factors and animal factors are analyzed to reveal different fates resulting from their selections.The last part is conclusion.Golding arouses readers’ rational association with reality in his works,both creating a much flexible structure and conveying ethical meaning better through the intertwining and complicated ethical issues.