Fear In Al Gore's Paradise Lost

A Paradise Lost

TOPIC SENTENCE. As the savages are almost completely unrecognizable as young schoolboys, they commit the ultimate sin of any human being: murder. Shortly after Simon’s exchange with the pig’s head, he defies the threat of the head and goes to tell the other boys that the beast is actually a dead parachutist. In the dark and pouring rain, Simon entered what is a savage dance performed by the boys when they killed an animal for meat. The boys are split between two groups: those who seek to be civilized and orderly, and those possessed utterly by evil. However, in this dance, the two groups joined together under the threat of the weather. Simon stumbles into the ring the boys make, and attempts to tell them the truth of the

The boys’ inherent fear of the beast and admitting to sin further drives them to discard reason, and make their descent from human beings to godless creatures quicker. The concept of such fear is described in Al Gore’s work, where he states how fear can “quickly become a self-perpetuating and freewheeling force…” (Gore 1), and that when humans are placed in an environment with constant fear, the people “[are] more likely to discard reason and turn to leaders who demonstrate dogmatic faith in ideological viewpoints” (Gore 14). In other words, fear and reason must be balanced within a society, and they are both overpowering when that relationship is unbalanced. Fear and reason are both vital to the survival of human nature, but it is the struggle between the two that leads to chaos and self-destruction. As for following a leader with dogmatic viewpoints, the majority of the boys pursue the more animalistic of the two leaders to be chosen towards the end of the novel, when they are devoid of their own reason and consumed with fear. They continue to follow this path of evil to ultimately burn their garden of Eden in an attempt to savagely murder one boy, the previous leader, who defies the rules of the new