There's a couple of great lines in another great story, from Steinbeck, East of Eden: I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Seems to offer an idea or two for debate about evil. Here, Steinbeck suggests evil is born into the world. In another: maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil & ugly things germinate and grow strong, Steinbeck
seems to be offering another explanation for evil...or maybe really not another option, but one that perhaps explains the actions of the boys in Lord of the Flies. In another story, one that King uses in his Hearts in Atlantis story, Ted, this old buck, has Bobby, a young man, read a couple stories. I believe Lord of the Flies is one of them and the other is A Separate Peace from John Knowles...or maybe I'm injecting this last into King's story...as it helped explain our actions, young boys growing up during the turbulence of the 60s. King's story, Hearts in Atlantis, truth be told, touched me like few stories have and his story should be included on the shelf with all of the stories in my post.
I wonder if I already posted this...posted a post like this? If ever there was a wiz there was...and so on and so forth and scooby dooby dooby. Anyway...check out all the above stories if you enjoyed Lord of the Flies. For us, like Gene and Phineas in Knowles' story, we played rough because we thought we were going to war...Vietnam. So in that sense, seems like it's legitimate to wonder if in fact evil isn't fostered in a larger sense, society as a whole. And my last connection is to Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and the ending of that remarkable story...taking that "society as a whole" idea and looking at lemmings...that animal that rushes headlong into the sea. There's this idea I call 'the mark of zero'...maybe a tad lame...but there is present in the above stories...and others I've read, this idea that we as a group want to disappear, we want to bury our self...or Self. Clarke's story has an ending that'd I'm sure you'd enjoy in that regard.