Virtue In Lord Of The Flies: Literary Analysis

Now, after analyzing the examples of people falling from a place of virtue to a place of vice due to an inability to resist desire, an interesting similarity has arisen. The similarity pertains to what each character does towards the end of their story. In Lord of the Flies, the story ends with the boys being found on the island by the naval officer who saw the forest fire that they had started. When the officer finds the boys, he remarks on the fact that they had done such terrible things at that they should have been able to maintain better behavior than that, and when the officer says this to the boys something interesting happens. As Ralph listened to the officer’s criticism “tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to

This also happens in Heart of Darkness when Kurtz dies. When Marlow is with Kurtz, moments before his death, he hears Kurtz’s final words; “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad 64). Right before Kurtz dies, he realized what he had become and what he had done, and all he can say about it is how horrifying it is. So in both cases those who became vicious due to giving into their will also were able to see the horrors of what they had done later on, which means that their conscience or sense of virtue was still intact. This suggests that the act of giving into desire does not pervert or corrupt a persons sense of virtue but instead takes over. Thus this transformation seems to leave the person committing vice in a sort of incontinence, in which their sense of virtue is still there somewhere, but will or desire has taken over and started to direct their actions. The whole process begins to sound similar to the model of the soul which Socrates draws in which appetites are able to take over the soul and control the person while reason is left to the side. As a result the person lives a vicious life because they have allowed the incorrect portion of the soul to guide their