Constructing Identities and Modeling Leaderships in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954): A Primitive-Civilized Binary Contex

Abstract

^{To this day, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has never ceased to surprise critics and researchers alike with the profundity, richness and novelty of its ideas and concepts. A huge body of studies and research papers have addressed a wide array of concepts ranging from primitiveness, civilization, symbolism of characters, power; alienation from culture and civilization, to the subversion and loss of faith in humanity and the vulnerability and decline of civilization in the face of savagery. Some studies have touched upon the concepts of leadership and identity, but slightly and as peripheral ideas. However, no study—to the researcher’s best knowledge—has treated the concepts of identity construction and leadership modeling as its key concern, or individually addressed them from a similar perspective. Hence, the current research paper investigates the concepts of identity constructs and leadership models together, and not only within the context of the primitive-civilized binary opposition, but also within a common and comprehensive frame of reference. Besides, it detects and analyzes various values, beliefs, and attitudes germane to the concepts under study, and the overall mechanism within which they operate as a unified whole to construct identities, model leaderships and become characteristically defining factors.}