Alienation and fetishism in William Golding's Lord of the Flies: A Marxist analysis

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" with reference to the concepts of alienation and fetishism in Marxist theory. Marxism asserts that commodity production in the capitalist system is the base of the alienation and fetishism that prevail in the economic, social, and political relations. This thesis claims that Lord of the Flies allegorically reflects the capitalist society. Private property, which shapes the base of the capitalist society, is represented by the act of hunting in the novel. Hunting is considered to be the origin of alienation in Lord of the Flies. The act of hunting, along with the oppression, violence and tyranny that it produces, alienates the characters to their sense of identity, the other individuals and nature. The characters, alienated from reality, generate fetishes which are the products of false consciousness and which shape the relations in the superstructure of the society. Moreover, in the novel the concepts such as loneliness, despair, hopelessness, rootlessness, disintegration, depersonalisation, and dehumanisation, to which alienated individuals are exposed in the industrialized capitalist society, are depicted through the plot, characters, and the characters' relations with each other, with themselves, and with nature. Keywords: Fetishism, alienation, Marxist Analysis