How Does Golding Use Fear In Lord Of The Flies

489 Words1 Page

What Makes People Savage Individuals can quickly spiral from well-behaved to savage and animalistic. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, follows the story of many boys who crash land on a deserted island. It focuses on the tipping point that pushes young boys over the edge of sane to mad, and it perfectly illustrates the slow descent from civilization to savagery and the inevitable fate of rule and order. When placed in an extreme, fear-inducing environment, the situation can escalate quickly, causing chaos and disorder. The extreme fear the boys felt on the island was the reason for their outrageous and savage behavior. The relationship between fear and violence was infallibly explained when Golding stated, “When people are afraid they discover the violence within them and when they are afraid together they …show more content…

In the events leading up to the brutal killing of one of the boys, a terrified group of boys becomes on edge and violent during a frightening thunderstorm, and “out of the terror rose [a] desire, thick, urgent, blind” (Golding, Lord 214). The desire the boys felt at this moment was to kill. This group of boys felt very scared and blinded by fear and killed one of the people they considered a friend. The environment caused sudden fear and panic, which then led to the savage killing of the boy. Some may say that people are born with savage and animalistic tendencies deep inside their brains; it is true that some people can be born with conditions that cause them to act aggressively and savagely. However, before there was fear on the island, rule and order played a big part and the boys were fairly civilized, that is, until the environment induced more and more fear and produced chaos. The situation the boys faced influenced their behavior a lot because "All you really need is a situation that facilitates moving across that line of good and evil" (qtd. in

Open Document