From Heart of Whiteness to Heart of Darkness and the Subversion of the Western Eurocentric Discourse: A Postcolonial Reading of Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Abstract

The present essay scrutinizes the subversion of the western Eurocentric discourse of civilizational supremacy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). It attempts to trace the way Golding delineates the deviation of the European society from the world of order and civilization that is referred to here as ‘the heart of whiteness’ into the world of disorder and savagery or what is labelled here as ‘the heart of darkness’ to create a form of internal colonization. Put under a postcolonial microscope, the study attempts to show how the western Eurocentric view of civilization is undermined in such a way the conflict is described as a sort internal colonization. As a picaresque text, the novel offers the readers an opportunity to probe into the experience of children group who—when are evacuated from Britain because of a nuclear war—find themselves stranded in an uninhabited island after the crash of their airplane and the death of all the adults. In dealing with the new situation, the schoolchildren decide to fashion a utopian society, but their attempts at establishing a social order gradually devolve into savagery when some of them turn into internal colonizers in a Darwinist fashion. Finally abandoning all moral constraints, the colonizer-boys commit murder and lead mutiny against democracy’s camp before they are rescued to return to civilization.