After watching a new Stephen King TV adaptation, it is hard not to notice how it seemingly challenges the haunting message behind a banned 71-year-old book. More often than not, Stephen King’s stories peel back the layers of the ordinary lives of human characters to reveal a darker, scarier core.
Owing to this, even though most Stephen King books are fictional and almost always have eerie fantastical elements, their central themes seem relatable in more ways than one. As bizarre and imaginative as a Stephen King story may initially seem, it often mirrors one’s real-world fears surrounding morality, mortality, loss of individual freedom, and the dark influence of power.
An acclaimed Stephen King book, which has been adapted into a TV show, seems to riff on similar real-world anxieties. A closer look at the Stephen King TV show also reveals how its overarching message is antithetical to that of another renowned 71-year-old book that was once banned because of its perceived moral message.
The Institute Serves As An Anti-Thesis To Lord Of The Flies
The Stephen King Show Counters The Main Theme That Drives The Classic Novel
Stephen King’s The Institute and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies have a similar story setup where children find themselves in an isolated, terrifying situation, without the supervision of responsible adults. While the young characters in Lord of the Flies have no adults around them, the ones in The Institute are controlled by those who hardly care about their well-being.
However, despite not being supervised by adults, the characters in both narratives act differently. In Lord of the Flies, chaos ensues when the boys gradually give in to their primal instincts and realize that the absence of rules allows them to indulge in violence, dominance, and cruelty without consequence.
As a result, they turn increasingly barbaric and create divides among themselves instead of finding a way out. The ones in The Institute, in contrast, join forces and try to hold on to their innocence instead of succumbing to their darker impulses. With its portrayal of its central young boys, Lord of the Flies attempts to capture how society reveals an internal evil when all constraints are removed.
The Institute seems to counter this idea by showing that the young characters are not a source of their own terror. Unlike the ones in Lord of the Flies, they seem to have an internal voice that guides them to fight against oppressive forces and help one another find justice against external evil.
Interestingly, Lord Of The Flies Inspired Stephen King To Become An Author
Lord Of The Flies Changed Stephen King As A Teenager
In an interview (via The Guardian), Stephen King said that he first read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at the age of 12. He compared the book with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, recalling how he was obsessed with Ralph and Jack just how many kids were with Harry Potter at the peak of its popularity.
In many ways, Stephen King’s It also echoes Lord of the Flies with its exploration of the loss of childhood innocence.
The King of Horror also revealed that, even though it took him a while to truly understand the symbolism and sexual subtext in the book, he wanted to write something similar. With this, Lord of the Flies became one of the most defining books Stephen King read, playing a key role in paving the way for him to become an author.
