Review Detail

Reader reviewed by verathraghna

The Lord of the Rings warrants a 4 only because the central message it teaches is one that the author didn't intend. Golding wrote the book as an exposition on how bad humans are. Despite its negative message, it has become a classic, and luckily so. His choice of children makes it difficult for people to dismiss the happenings with "they are evil." Rather we are forced to admit that this is simply a look at raw human nature. And it's at this point that we come to a juncture; either raw human nature is evil or good. If it is evil then we really have no choice but to accept what Christianity says -- that we should try to spend our lives repenting for what we are. If you believe, like I do, that we are good, then you are forced to consider the realities of human nature and deal with them. The chaos and violence are natural to humans until a social structure which they can believe in arises. In the case of these schoolboys the history of the world was being replayed; they lost their belief in the validity of being an English schoolboy and defaulted to choosing a King and reconstructing rituals and a religion around their fear of the beast. They were not evil; that's just the way we humans are. If you love humans, you will forgive them this and use the knowledge to your advantage by for example trying to stay out of harm's way when society is looking for scapegoats.