In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of boys is evacuated from England during a time of war. During their evacuation, their plane crashes onto a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. Throughout this allegory, readers follow the boys attempt to create civilization and their basic human instincts take over. According to Golding in an interview in 1955 “the theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectful.” This book laid out more than a story about boys on an island, but of how humans revert back to basic instinct when they are distanced from society. The characters and prominent items in the book display this theory on human nature.
The boys on the island range from ages six to twelve years old. They generally separate themselves into two groups; the older boys and the little ones. This categorization represents the levels of society. The younger boys represent the common people because they
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rely on the older ones to find shelter and food. The older ones serve as the ruling class and leaders in the group. Initially, Ralph, the most mature boy in the group, takes control as the leader of all of the boys. Two other boys, Simon and Piggy, help Ralph in the initial moments after the plane crash and for most of the book, in leading the group. Another boy, Jack, and his friend, Roger, become bitter over not being leaders of the group. They have different priorities for the group than Ralph, Simon, and Piggy. While they want to first build shelter and a signal fire, Jack and Roger want to go out hunting for food. These boys all represent different sides of human nature and civilization. As the leader of the group who focuses on maintaining order, Ralph represents civilization. Society trains people to not immediately react on instinct and teaches kindness. He believes in having rules and being well-behaved. When the boys first gather after the plane crash he says, “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything” (Golding 34). As the leader of the boys, Ralph immediately begins to recreate civilization on the island while they wait for rescue. Near the end of the allegory, after nearly every other character has reverted back to natural human darkness, Ralph gives up on his ideals and cries. Critic of Lord of the Flies and author of “Symbol Hunting Golding’s Lord of the Flies,” Jerome Martin, writes “The security of boyhood was gone, and he tries to cry for mercy while warding off what comes” (Martin 413). In the last moments of the book, Ralph converts to human darkness, moments before rescue. Ralph’s friends, Simon and Piggy, also represent the goodness that comes from humans and civilizations that are created through order and rules. Simon is very kind and represents the complete goodness that comes from all human beings. He stands up and protects the little ones and works for the good of the group, even when he is hungry and afraid. Piggy, a plump boy with glasses, represents science and intellectual reasoning. Opposed to these protagonists are Jack and Roger. Jack becomes the leader of Ralph’s opposition and starts his own camp where their main focus is hunting and fulfilling basic human desires like hunting. He has a constant desire for power and soon becomes overzealous and savage. While going out hunting and capturing a pig, Golding noted: “the desire to squeeze and hurt was over-powering” (Golding 99) for Jack. Roger, his second-hand, is extremely brutal and is bloodthirsty. These two demonstrate the basic primal desire to satisfy urges and not care for others. In short, they act as the evil side of human beings. There are also objects in Lord of the Flies that represent the boys’ connections to civilization. When the boys first crash onto the island, Ralph finds a conch shell which he uses to summons the other boys to his location, thus immediately becoming the leader of the group. During group meets, whoever held the shell was the one that was allowed to speak. The shell was a vessel of democracy and order on the island. As all of the boys begin listening to their primal urges more, the conch loses its power. The boys don’t feel the connection to civilization as strongly as they do their need to eat. The conch shell doesn’t provide them satisfaction to their hunger; therefore, the boys lose interest in it; all but Ralph. Even after he took part Simon’s murder, he clutches onto the shell, or the manifestation or order, while he recounts his part in the act. The conch eventually meets its demise. Piggy is holding onto the shell while insisting that the other boys respect that he is the only one that is allowed to speak. During this, a boulder is dislodged from a hill which kills Piggy and breaks the conch. With the rolling of the boulder, both reasoning and order leave the island. Piggy’s glasses were not crushed by the boulder. They had been stolen by Jack for his group because they were used to focus sunlight and start fires. In a cognitive sense, they represented intellectual thought and actions. When making decisions, Piggy rubs his glasses and makes well-thought-out decisions. Once his glasses are stolen, he begins to transition to his savagery. He is never given the chance to complete this reversion. When he is killed, the story is left with only one civilized character; Ralph. Ralph’s connection to civilization is stronger than the other boys. He realized early during their time on the island that in order to be rescued, they needed to make a signal for someone to find them. He formulated a plan to create a large signal fire that passing ships could see so that they could rescue them. In the beginning, the boys are excited about lighting the fire and watching it burn. In their excitement, the boys accidently burn down a large patch of forest and one of the little ones goes missing, presumably burned to death in the fire. From the moment the fire is lit, it represents the boys’ connection to civilization and their commitment in being rescued. At first, the fire burns brightly at all times. The older boys that were tasked with keeping it going become bloodthirsty and stop prioritizing the maintenance of the fire. Ralph said, “I’m chief because you chose me. And we were going to keep the fire going. Now you just run after food” (Golding 134). When they don’t maintain the fire, the boys commit to living on the island more than returning to their life at home. This initially breaks Ralphs spirit, and although he tries to rebound back to normal, this begins his slow descent into his own inner darkness. Fire in this controlled form symbolizes their civilization. In the wild form that is presented by Jack when he tries to burn the whole forest in an attempt to kill Ralph, the fire is the all-consuming savagery. Other symbols of savagery and human inner-darkness present themselves in Lord of the Flies in the form of the Lord of the Flies and the Beast. When Jack caught a particularly large pig, he decapitated it and placed the head on a large skewer and placed the skewer in the ground so that they head would hang above the boys’ heads. He leaves it there as an offering to the beast that they believe is on the island. As it hangs there, the head begins to collect maggots and flies circle around the head, giving it its name. The head is used as a physical representation of the beast and as a show for the devil. “The pig’s head acts as Beelzebub to the boys, in which they essentially pray and act as the head is all-knowing and all-powerful” (Oldsey 46). This point is proven when several boys have conversations with the head. Simon is told by the head that “there isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. I’m the Beast” (Golding 128) and “we are going to have fun on this island together” (Golding 128). Golding admits the Lord of the Flies is the beast and is powerful. The beast is immediately feared when the boys crash onto the island. They believe the sounds they hear from the jungle come from something moving towards them. They leave the Lord of the Flies as a sacrifice to the beast. As belief of the beast grows within each of the boys, their savagery increases as well. During Simon’s conversation with the Lord of the Flies, the pig head says “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you! I’m the reason things are the way they are” (Golding 128). As the Lord of the Flies is a physical manifestation of the beast, we can conclude the beast is coming out in each boy. The beast is representing inner-darkness and savagery. The beast was prominent in the story from their first moments on the island because the island brought it out in them. The characters and objects in Lord of the Flies demonstrate human instinct and civilization’s effect on human behavior.
Ralph, Simon, and Piggy show what happens to people when intellectual reasoning, order, and democracy take control over basic human instinct. Their use of the conch employed their need for rules and democracy. Using that order, Ralph tried to implement rules to manage the group, like building a signal fire. When it was allowed to burn out, their last connection to civilization was lost. This allowed Jack and Roger to lose their remaining humanity. With their desire for power, savagery, and brutality, all that they cared for was fulfilling their need of hunger and shelter. When they couldn’t find the beast, they resulted in appeasing it with the Lord of the Flies to protect themselves from its rath. In the end, the beast was within them
all. The symbolism in this allegory brought another dimension to the work. Not only was this a book about children who crash onto an island and must govern themselves, but a novel of human desire versus human conditioning to conform to society’s rules. Golding wrote about the human condition in children when adults are not around, yet Lord of the Flies can relate to every reader.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies portrays the lives of young British boys whose plane crashed on a deserted island and their struggle for survival. The task of survival was challenging for such young boys, while maintaining the civilized orders and humanity they were so accustomed too. These extremely difficult circumstances and the need for survival turned these innocent boys into the most primitive and savaged mankind could imagine. William Golding illustrates man’s capacity for evil, which is revealed in man’s inherent nature. Golding uses characterization, symbolism and style of writing to show man’s inhumanity and evil towards one another.
eventually turns the boys into frenzied savages, undaunted by the barbaric orders he decrees. The boys focus more and more on hunting and exploring, neglecting their primary objective: returning home to their families and civilization. The island boys experience manipulation, intimidation, and brutality while under Jack’s authority, revealing that the impact on those under reckless control can prove to be extremely harsh and
The boys are no longer had order and become savages To add to their downfall, the death of Piggy he was the voice of reasoning that he was trying to reason with everyone what would be the right thing to do; even though nobody paid attention to what he had to say but they did listen. As a consequence, without the voice of reasoning on the island there is a no hold bars of what could happen next to the boys is a free for The boys undertook a persona that they are not familiar with and needed to adapt to a persona that their not familiar with such a hunter and or gather. A person that they needed to become. I recently read a book named The Sunflower by Simon Wisenthal.
In the novel The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a group of English schools boys are stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean. The boys’ plane crashed into the ocean in a futuristic war-ridden world. In these dire times, the boys manage to create a hierarchy and assign different roles to all of them. Throughout the novel, a human element of fear terrorizes their island society. Fear is the key element in the novel. It controls how their island society functions and it controls the boys’ actions. Fear was something that affected the adolescent school boys to a large extent by that led to the corruption and crumble of their society.
Humans are intricate. They have built civilizations and invented the concept of society, moving accordingly from savage primal instincts to disciplined behaviour. William Golding, however, does not praise humanity in his pessimistic novel, Lord of The Flies, which tells the story of a group of British schoolboys who are stranded on an uninhabited tropical island without any adults – a dystopia. Golding evidently expresses three views of humanity in this novel. He suggests that, without the rules and restrictions on which societies and civilizations are built, humans are intrinsically selfish, impulsive and violent.
In William Golding's Lord of The Flies, the boys try to maintain civility, but nature pulls them into savagery. Nature always seems to pull man in, even when man tries to fight it; the boys give in by hunting, fighting, and doing whatever they please. All of this is because there is no authority in nature. The boys try to maintain civilization on the island, but nature is gradually luring them in and revealing their true human instincts.
Circumstance and time can alter or determine the different paths a group of young boys will take. These paths can have the power to strip children of their own innocence. Such a statement can be explored in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” as it ventures into the pros and cons of human nature. William Golding’s tale begins with a group of English school boys who crash land on a deserted tropical island during World War II. In Lord of the Flies, the island that the boys crash on is beautiful, glamorous, and magnificent; yet, it proves to become a dystopia by the horror of the cruelty, violence, and inhumanity.
A part of human nature is inherently chaotic and “barbaric.” These natural impulses, however, are generally balanced by the human desire for leadership and structure. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding discusses what may happen in a scenario in which there is a lack of societal structure and constraints. Golding wants the reader to understand that humans have an innate desire to be primitive- describing it as “mankind 's essential illness”- that is usually suppressed by an equal desire for order. Under extreme circumstances, humans may revert back to their most basic impulses that they usually keep suppressed due to social norms. Throughout the book, the boys’ primitive behavior is heightened by their lack of a leader and, eventually, their
One of the main themes in William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is that without civilization, there is no law and order. The expression of Golding's unorthodox and complex views are embodied in the many varied characters in the novel. One of Golding's unorthodox views is that only one aspect of the modern world keeps people from reverting back to savagery and that is society. Golding shows the extreme situations of what could possibly happen in a society composed of people taken from a structured society then put into a structureless society in the blink of an eye. First there is a need for order until the people on the island realize that there are no rules to dictate their lives and take Daveers into their own hands. Golding is also a master of contrasting characterization. This can be seen in the conflicts between the characters of Jack, the savage; Simon, the savior; and Piggy, the one with all the ideas.
To begin with, when the group of boys first arrive on the island, they are well mannered young English boys.The
The issue on whether man is good or evil has been debated over several generations. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of young boys are stranded on an uninhabited island. In the beginning, the boys have fun and are carefree while adventuring on the island. With no adults around to tell them how to behave, the boys declare war on one another and face several conflicts. These conflicts provide Golding with the opportunity to explore the idea that society restrains the evil intentions of human nature.
of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The
William Golding's first book, Lord of the Flies, is the story of a group of boys of different backgrounds who are marooned on an unknown island when their plane crashes. As the boys try to organize and formulate a plan to get rescued, they begin to separate and as a result of the dissension a band of savage tribal hunters is formed. Eventually the "stranded boys in Lord of the Flies almost entirely shake off civilized behavior: (Riley 1: 119). When the confusion finally leads to a manhunt [for Ralph], the reader realizes that despite the strong sense of British character and civility that has been instilled in the youth throughout their lives, the boys have backpedaled and shown the underlying savage side existent in all humans. "Golding senses that institutions and order imposed from without are temporary, but man's irrationality and urge for destruction are enduring" (Riley 1: 119). The novel shows the reader how easy it is to revert back to the evil nature inherent in man. If a group of well-conditioned school boys can ultimately wind up committing various extreme travesties, one can imagine what adults, leaders of society, are capable of doing under the pressures of trying to maintain world relations.
When the children become stranded on the island, the rules of society no longer apply to them. Without the supervision of their parents or of the law, the primitive nature of the boys surfaces, and their lives begin to fall apart. The downfall starts with their refusal to gather things for survival. The initial reaction of the boys is to swim, run, jump, and play. They do not wish to build shelters, gather food, or keep a signal fire going. Consequently, the boys live without luxury that could have been obtained had they maintained a society on the island. Instead, these young boys take advantage of their freedom and life as they knew it deteriorates.
Ralph and Piggy’s sense of responsibility and maturity initially brings to the island a voice for everyone, calling for a brotherhood among the boys in order to survive and eventually be rescued. Early on the novel reads “There was a stillness about Ralph's as he sat that marked him out: there was his size and attractive appearance; and most securely, yet most powerful there was the conch.” (Golding Pg. 22). This quote describes the presence Ralph promoted on the island early on in their adventure. He encouraged equal say amongst the boys through the conch. In order to speak, one had to have possession of the symbolic shell. The shell representing the Parliamentary government in which they had left at home. Furthermore, Piggy, gaining an influential voice through Ralph, shouts his concern to the immature reckless boys “The first thing we ought to have made was shelters down there by the beach... Then when you get here you build a bonfire that isn’t no use. Now you been and set the whole island on fire.” (Golding pg. 47). Like Ralph, Piggy’s responsibility and ability to plan for the future contradicts the actions of the boys, which in turn is the main reason for the separation between Jack and Ralph. Ralph and Piggy strive for a civilized way of life, yet find Jack leading an indirect revolt against any attempt to maintain order. Ralph and Piggy represent the good, civilized world in which they