War, Dystopia, and “The Beast with Red Cheeks” in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Abstract

This study attempts to compare the themes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1952) with the concepts suggested by Francis Fukuyama in his famous book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), and to show that the novel, written in the era that “has made all of us into deep historical pessimists” (Fukuyama 3), represents an ultimately dystopian world, the opposite of Fukuyama’s concept of “the End of History” of western liberal democracy. Defining the term “dystopia” as the idea of oppression, destruction, suffering, or trauma, this study goes so far as to regard the novel as nothing other than an ultimately dystopian novel, and finally concludes that Golding’s Lord of the Flies, deeply shadowed by the Second World War, can be construed as an antithesis to Fukuyama’s grand narrative theory of “the end of history” that entails the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.