The Adolescent Rebel

Abstract

The child or adolescent, identified for so long with the idea of an innocence as yet uncorrupted by the dissimulations of adulthood, bringing into this world recollections of the truths and ethical principles existent in the eternity it had so recently left, could no longer function in the new dispensation. The basic savagery of human instincts, chillingly revealed by Freud’s Totem and Taboo, and powerfully reinforced by Frazer and Conrad, had exposed how far the supposedly civilised societies of the West were motivated by the same greeds, cruelties, superstitions and lusts for power as had animated the most primitive tribes – promptings not inculcated in adulthood but now seen as innate in the human condition, waiting only for the tools and facilities that maturity would provide. That concept animated William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which constituted in many respects a re-enactment of the story of Cain and Abel, the scriptural account of the results of original sin, but transferred to a setting in which the gradual eruption of human savagery takes on Freudian and Darwinian undertones.