1.4.1 Four Traditional Researching Aspects of “Lord of the Flies”

①The evil human nature

According to the papers published from 1994 to the present, the evil human nature is always welcomed. Since the birth of the novel, the research of this topic never shows a few signs of stop. “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill. You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you.” (2014: 400) This sentence has been used to clarify that the evil is hidden in human nature, and there is more than one place to prove it in the book. The traditional direction was always trying to convince us that we are kind;however, Golding chose a different road, which reminds us that the possibility of becoming evil really exists, and we cannot be perfect. It’s no wonder that this topic could become a hit.

②The narrative structure

Besides the evil nature, the narrative structure is also a hot topic among those professors. “The narrative theory regards ‘narration’ as the target. And all the title, theme, or the marks are relevant to convey the intention, which is a "condensed" description.” Following this suggestion, there are many researchers who tried to analyse the novel from different angles. For example, Professor Chen Zhongmeng and Dai Hongxia unscrambled the book by their analysis of narrative structures of the subtitles of the novel.

③Feminist criticism

As is known to us all, it is obvious that there are no women characters in “Lord of the Flies”. This single point arouses someone’s interest. The most typical work shall be “the feminist interpretation of ‘Lord of the Flies’”, written by Wang Weixin. Wang argues that the author’s gender doesn’t decide the novel’s gender. On the contrary, there are different voices as well. Some professors believe that lacking female characters is one of the biggest leaks of this book. But all in all, we can easily see that the analysis in this aspect is also very popular.

④Mythological archetype

There is a saying goes “The structure of literature is mythological. Different types of literature constitute the different aspects of the ‘one center, the unified myth’.” In “Lord of the Flies”, we can still find some signs that are equivalent to mythological archetypes. In this way of thinking, there comes lots of articles talking about the relationships between the characters in this novel and the characters in Bible or some other myths. This theme has become another typical direction of studying “Lord of the Flies”.

1.4.2 New Angles of Researching “Lord of the Flies” in Recent Years

Above all, we have discussed about four traditional research directions, but actually in recent years, there are many new aspects coming into being. Although the number of them is not quite enough comparing to the past, they still expand the scope of the study and arouse more researchers’ interest. More and more people coming from different studying areas have participated in the research of this novel, which promotes the process of analysis. Next, let’s talk about some new and original angles.