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The characters in Golding’s Lord of the Flies are a group of schoolboys, stamped through with Britishness like seaside rock, educated by public schools in a system designed to overwhelm an empire and uses the slang and jargon common to their time. Since Golding is describing a community of children with adult readers in mind, the credibility of the characters is a prerequisite. In addition, they have to be made convincing in an imaginary …

…fable in a mythic frame will not be irrelevant; he suggests, “Simon is a ritual hero, who is metaphorically swallowed by a serpent or dragon ‘whose belly is the world, he undergoes a symbolic death in order to gain the elixir to revitalize his stricken society, and returns with his knowledge to the timid world as a redeemer”. The certainty of truth is incomprehensible to the rest. Truth-seekers are always walled up within an uncertain-certainty.