The lieutenant of a wrecked torpedo bomber named Christopher Martin makes a Herculean effort to climb an impenetrable cliff and then survive on a bare patch of land. Scenes from different periods of life pop up in his mind, miserable, petty, - a life that would be more suitable for the word "survival".Golding said that his novel is a parable about a man who first lost everything, to what he was striving for, and then “accepted the challenge of his God by an act of free will” and entered into rivalry with him. “This is the ordinary man: tormented and torturing others, fighting alone a courageous battle against God.”