Lord of the Flies

The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

This page houses a unit on William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. This novel takes place during or after WWII and involves a group of boys from an English Prep school who have been marooned on a deserted island without any adult supervision. The Lord of the Flies is generally regarded as Golding's masterpiece and is often on reading canons in high school English classes in America and England. You can check this book out at your local library, purchase it, or if you'd like, you can read the e-version of this book by clicking the link below:

Lord of the Flies, full text

How This is Organized

When I teach a novel, my first step is to read the book to decide what I think the theme is. I come from the school that thinks that the theme of a work is fairly subjective, so two different people may get a different theme from the same book. This usually determines the essay topic, which will help me on all of the rest. Once I read the book and decide what I believe about the theme (and hopefully write the essay topic), the next thing I decide is how many readings I'll break the book up into. This will be determined by how much I think the kids will be able to finish between class time (I don't give much of it) and home time and be realistically expected to finish because I'm going to quiz them on it. I'll then make both of the reading quizzes and the discussion questions. Students are expected to answer the reading quiz questions every period I see them or that a reading was assigned the night before, and in the discussion, we'll read selections from the book aloud and discuss as a class the questions I put in the discussions.

Back to the theme, because this is important: The discussion questions are tied directly to the theme and will help the students to understand the book and to write their essay at the end of the novel. Once I've determined the theme, I go back through the book-reading by reading-and I highlight my copy on the passages that I feel bring out the them. When I create the reading discussions, I list the selection of my highlight and mark the page then ask my question. The reason we do this is both so we can discuss these "pivotal passages" as a class answering my questions, and later when the students write their essays, they have notes with selections and page numbers they can use. 

Another trick I like to use: It's fun for me when teaching a novel to bring in outside sources that also illustrate the theme of the book. An example: I've often been tasked, like so many other 9th grade English teachers, with teaching the Odyssey. I often had my students watch the film Gallipolli, while we covered the Odyssey. During this coverage, we also read selections from the Iliad and watched parts of the movie Troy. Students often asked, "Why are we watching a WWI movie (Gallipolli) while we're covering Greek History?" If you've ever seen the film, in the end, the main character shockingly dies, and even modern 9th graders are unsettled by it...it's unexepected. Why watch Gallipoli during The Odyssey? Because 1400 men left Ithaca and only Odysseus returned...like the doomed soldiers of WWI, they went on fool's journey. So to me, both Gallipolli and the Odyssey have a similar theme: don't go on fool's journeys and get caught up in a wave of patriotism or whatever that may ultimately get you killed.

So what I do when I teach a novel is I use "Reading Activities" that pair with the theme of the novel. In the case above, I break up the film Gallipoli into several viewings that correspond with how many readings we'll do to cover the Odyssey. In Lord of the Flies, I've added several "Reading Activities" to illustrate the nature of both man and "The Beast" one finds in the novel. 

Back to Organization

In my world, I've organized Lord of the Flies into 7 readings

Lord of Flies Discussion Questions: