Fear In Lord Of The Flies Essay

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Fear can make you do amazing things but it could also lead to someone's downfall. A bunch of boys get stranded on an island without any grown-ups, and try to start civilization, but everything falls into chaos. In chapter 9, while the boys are dancing around the fire, Simion finds out the beast is just a parachute man. He tries to tell everyone, but gets beat to death in the process. This is an example of how fear can lead to savagery. In chapter 9 of Lord of the Flies, William Golding employs animal imagery, repetition, and symbolism to convey the theme that fear can lead the most civilized people to savagery. Consequently, due to the boys’ fear they started turning into a “beast”. William Golding employs this by using animal imagery. “A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainty. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe”(Golding 152). In their frenzy, the boys saw Simon under the cape of their fear, not as a human, but as a beast. Despite Simon’s pleas that he was not, in fact, the beast, the boys rushed to kill him: “There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws” (153). This was an inhumane act in which the boys were acting like animals instead of like …show more content…

He writes: “The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water”! (153). This symbolizes how the boys lost the good in them by killing Simon. Even nature itself attempts to disrupt their fear-driven savagery: “Then the clouds opened and let down the rain like a waterfall. The water bounded from the mountain-top, tore leaves and branches from the trees, poured like a cold” (153). Fear and hysteria ultimately destroys the boys’ humanity, and the Golding’s use of symbolism illustrates how the boys allowed their fear to overpower the good within

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