INDOCILE BODIES IN LORD OF THE FLIES

While commenting on Foucault’s “docile bodies” Rosemarie GarlandThomson rightly asserts, “Those who most depart from the normative standard are most subordinated.” This rule is also valid for Simon, Piggy and a small boy with a mulberry-coloured birthmark in Lord of the Flies. Simon’s epilepsy, Piggy’s asthma, fatness and shortsightedness, and that small boy’s birthmark on his face make them stigmatized in the society on the island. They are in fact against the Foucauldian “norm” namely “law of the modern society” for improvement. They cannot be disciplined as they have “pathological bodies”. That is why they are the unique people eliminated on the island. Both Ralph, representative of the democratic leadership, and Jack, that of the tyrannical one, try to govern the society by using “technologies of normalization facilitat[ing] the systematic creation, identification, classification” and controlling anomalies of any kind. Therefore, the stigmatized boys are divided from others. The study aims at analysing Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Nobel Prize winner, from a Foucauldian socio-cultural perspective on disability