It is worth noting that William Golding's post-war story Lord of the Flies (1954) is a parody of R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) in which a number of boys are placed on an island and their behaviour is disciplined, in that they never change or deteriorate neither physically nor morally. But Golding wants to prove in his novel that what happens in The Coral Island is quite unrealistic. Golding is concerned with the violence in human nature. Golding's boys revert to primitive savagery because evil controls and guides their behaviour. J. S. Ryan notes that Golding's novel deals with the "inward realities, the inalienable violence in human nature, the responsibilities of organizing a society, and the failure of rational behaviour (symbolized in Ralph).The main theme of Lord of the Flies, as James R. Hurt says, is the deflation of English national egotism. The novel, he adds, "neatly punctures the myth of English schoolboy innocence celebrated by Ballantyne's hearty, wholesome The Coral Island .