摘 要

威廉·戈尔丁对人性的看法持有悲观的色彩。他是一个道德主义者,他希望能通过自己的行动知会其他人,人性本质上是邪恶的,人们应该想方设法去控制自己邪恶的行为。戈尔丁的杰作《蝇王》正是在这种想法中诞生的,它介绍了人性的黑暗面以及人性是如何沦丧的。这篇论文关注人性恶主题，主要侧重研究人性是如何逐步沦丧的，并且结合社会现实对人性恶进行研究。这篇论文主要由五个部分构成：第一部分展示了这本小说的国内外研究背景和几个主要的研究方向,其次谈到了本论文的研究方向及其重要性。第二部分侧重介绍作者威廉·戈尔丁以及《蝇王》的主要情节,还展示了戈尔丁如何技巧地揭露人性恶。论文第三部分侧重对小说中人性恶主题的揭露,同时还通过对小说中主要事件和一些象征性的物件的描述展现了人性是如何在荒岛上逐步沦丧,野蛮是怎么逐渐取代文明的。 另外,本段还提到了同时存在于小说中和现实社会中的一些人性恶的表现,使得本文对《蝇王》的研究更具有现实针对性,能更好地贴近生活。第四部分讲解人性沦丧的主要原因,包括内因和外因,内因主要是因为人们本身内心是邪恶的,人心是有缺陷的, 外因主要是因为环境所致以及教育监管的缺失。最后一部分是结论。通过对以上方面的研究,人们会对人性的真相有一个更深入的了解。

关键词：《蝇王》；人性沦丧；文明

Abstract

William Golding, a pessimistic moralist, holds that humanity is wicked in nature. His masterpiece Lord of the Flies depicts the dark side and degradation of human nature in order to awaken people’s awareness of the evilness and come up with solutions to curb their evil behaviors. The paper concerns the humanity revealed in this literary work, with emphasis on the gradual humanity degradation and the comprehensive causes of this degradation.

The paper mainly consists of four parts. The first part pays attention to a brief introduction to the author William Golding and the main plots of Lord of the Flies, demonstrating some techniques that Golding uses to manifest the truth of humanity. The following part will focus on the revelation of the dark side of humanity as well as the gradual degradation of human nature, including symbols and major events standing for the deprivation of civilization and arrival of savagery. Furthermore, it will refer to evils that both exist in the novel and in society, allowing the study of the novel to be more realistic. The third part of this paper will analyze factors contributing to the loss of humanity, which will fall into internal factors and external factors. The last part is the conclusion. The paper aims to cast some light on people’s understanding towards the truth of evil humanity as exposed by the masterpiece – Lord of the Flies.

Key Words: Lord of the Flies; degradation of humanity; civilization

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 William Golding: a moralist 3

2.2 The novel Lord of the Flies 3

3 Darkness of Man’s Heart: Degradation of Humanity 5

3.1 Degradation of humanity in Lord of the Flies 5

3.2 Evils in society 8

4 Factors Contributing to the Degradation of Humanity 11

4.1 Internal factors 11

4.2 External factors 13

4.3 Introspection 14

5 Conclusion 16

References 17

Acknowledgements 19

Degradation of Humanity in Lord of the Flies

1 Introduction

The studies for Lord of the Flies, a novel written by William Golding, have never ceased. The seeming children’s story which actually discloses the evil human nature is so intriguing that it has won a good many people’s hearts. After the publication, the novel has been translated into more than thirty languages and widely spread all over the world. Extraordinary profound connotations of the novel have always been a preferable study subject for those scholars, especially after the novel winning the Nobel Prize. Thousands of professors and critics at home and abroad endeavor to dig out the in-depth meanings of the novel from various perspectives. A large number of works related to Lord of the Flies have occurred.

Among those works, some concentrate on the aspect of the darkness of human’s heart and religious redemption. For example, Afaf Ahmed Hasan Al-Saidi from Aden University in Yemen studiesd this aspect and finishes his paper Savagery and the Heart of Darkness in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies Studies in Literature and Language. Some studies focus on how the characters’ destructive behaviors influence the environment of the desert island. For instance, Vanina Carrara Sigrist studies this aspect on his work Biopolitical discharges in a literature of megalomaniacs. Some experts put their emphasis on the subject of chemistry and biography in connection with this topic. For example, John R Skoyles, a neuroscientist and evolutionary psychologist, emphasizes the study on how can brain or other parts of body influence humanity. He writes it in his article Why our brains cherish humanity: Mioor neurons and colamus humanitatem. Traditionally, scholars mainly put their focus on the study of four aspects: the evil human nature, the narrative structure, the Mythical and Archetypal Interpretation and the Feminist Interpretation. (Wang, 2003) Furthermore, with the deepening of research, tremendous new directions have appeared. For instance, some scholars would like Freudian psychoanalysis, some prefer symbolism or irony analysis of the novel. (Ding, 2012) Generally speaking, frequently scholars prefer to study the novel from the perspective of humanity, proving that this field is worthy of exploration. However, those works in this field mainly stop at the study of the novel contents, seldom connecting the contents with the reality. To put it another way, the study fields in the aspect of humanity are too narrow.