In a May 2020 article titled “The real Lord of the Flies: What happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months” journalist Rutger Bregman writes about how a group of schoolboys in 1965 were marooned on an island and tries to find where the boys and those involved in their rescue are today. What follows is an interesting and thoughtful article in which Bergman writes about his search to find a “Real lord of the Flies” trying to understand if William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” was an accurate portrayal, stating that he wondered if “anyone had ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island?”. This question eventually leads him to finding a story referencing the rescue of six Tongan boys and the name of the captain that had found them marooned on an island in 1966. With this name as his only lead he goes on to find and meet the captain and one of the rescued boys. The article then goes on to explain the life of not only the captain that rescued the boys, but the lives of the boys that were marooned on an island in the pacific and how they coexisted until they were found. Bregman is able to thoughtfully write this story and showcase the bonds that existed between the marooned schoolboys and the captain that found them, but also the ways in which a real “Lord of the Flies” was very different than the one portrayed in Golding’s book.
[1 quote, 1 link, 1 image and 256 words]
Comments