Themes

Freedom

The main theme of the novel Running Wild by J.G. Ballard is freedom. This theme is also suggested in the title of the novel. The expression “to run wild” means to grow without restraint and discipline. The children in the novel are running wild in the sense that they have been freed from a restrictive lifestyle imposed on them by their parents. 

Payne and Greville repeatedly mention that the Pangbourne Village and its households look like prisons, even before they realize the children’s motive for committing the murders. 

In the beginning, Greville argues that the estate is a comfortable prison, from which no one would want to escape. He notes that the parents have been planning every minute of their children’s lives for them in an intelligent manner. His focus is at first on the positive effect that this well-organized lifestyle might have had on the children. The parents also probably thought that they were doing what was best for their children. 

However, once Greville realizes the effect such control had on the children, he changes his mind:

Unable to express their own emotions or respond to those of the people around them, suffocated under a mantle of praise and encouragement, they were trapped forever within a perfect universe. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

It is possible that, for the children, the fact that all their days were planned in detail, with no possibility for change, gradually became very traumatic. This worsened once they reached puberty. They tried in vain to find their own identity...