Setting and its importance to the theme of the darkness of man's heart.
The setting is essential to the theme of the darkness of man's heart, in William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. The tragic and provocative tale is set somewhere on a tropical island where a group of British boys are stranded after a plane crash, which no "grown-ups" survive. It is wartime, which suggests conflict. However a sense of timelessness is developed in the novel making the era quite irrelevant. It is place rather than time that is important in the novel. The dark, unknown island generates a sense of fear in the boys, which gradually removes their veneer of civilisation to an unexpected extent, revealing the darkness of man's heart. .
The island has four main features. There is the mountain at one end, on which the boys attempt to keep a signal fire burning. There is the Castle Rock on the other end, where Jack and his tribe create their fortress at the end of the novel. In between, covering most of the island, is the dark forest. Between the edge of the forest "scattered with decaying coconuts" and the water is the beach, a "thin bow-stave, endless- On the beach there is a bathing pool, in which the water is warmer than blood. About a mile out, past the coral reef where "the white surf flinked" lies the ocean, dark blue, cold and deep. The island is in no way the tropical paradise you one might imagine it to be. Golding's choice of words is cold and hard - he describes the lagoon as a "mountain lake" - or insistent and pressuring, "and always, almost visible, was the heat". The island is also a symbol in itself, a microcosm, its population a group of, which have to learn to live with each other.
The boys first see the island as a great opportunity to have fun until they were rescued, but they find very little pleasure in what the island has to offer. The fruit is unripe and the creepers of the jungle scratch them, tear their clothes and leave them dirty.