Savagery In Lord Of The Flies

Do civilization and savagery fight a constant battle? In the novel Lord of the Flies and two selected poems, the ultimate problem is the balance of civilization and savagery. In both Lord of the Flies and two selected poems, the authors demonstrate that savagery discourages advancement and hurts civilization through the use of figurative language, allusion, and symbolism.

Figurative language is used in Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Crane’s I Stood Upon a High Place frequently to support that savagery discourages advancement and hurts civilization. One of these examples in Lord of the Flies is when the tribes kill the sow in the forest.

They surrounded the covert but the sow got away with the sting of another spear in her flank. The trailing

In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses biblical references to help the reader better understand the situation. For example, when Simon sneaks off into the forest and observes nature, Golding alludes to the fact that Simon is presented as a Christ figure.

Nothing moved but a pair of gaudy butterflies that danced around each other in the hot air. Holding his breath, he cocked a critical ear at the sounds of the island. Evening was advancing toward the island; the sounds of the bright fantastic birds, the bee-sounds, even the crying of the gulls that were returning to their roosts among the square rocks, were fainter. The deep sea breaking miles away on the reef made an undertone less perceptible than the susurration of the blood.

In Lord of the Flies, the ultimate object in the story is the conch. It represents power and whoever possesses it is the one who has the most power. Golding states, “The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist” (181). After the conch is shattered, their society falls and is at its worst point. This represents the loss of civilization and power, which discontinues the symbolism of the conch and power. In Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, the author uses symbolism to have the women represent the savages, and the sons represent success. “Their women cluck like starved pullets, dying for love” (Wright 10-11). In the above quote, the savages are the women because they “cluck like starved pullets” and act differently than a normal person would. Being that pullets are chickens, the author draws a parallel of the women to chickens which is also savagery. On the other side, the sons “growing suicidally beautiful” in line 13 essentially shows that the families do not have the same kind of opportunities that their sons have, and that is why the sons are described as so beautiful. In both works, they each contain one negative symbolism, the conch being destroyed, and the women being savages, but the interpretation of each is