Lord Of The Flies Critical Analysis Essay

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Lord of the Flies is often interpreted as a dark but simplistic revelation of human cruelty. Beneath the veneer of civility lurk malice, savagery, and the will to slaughter. Through circumstances out of their control, they crash land on an island, without social control and morals, naive children begin to murder one another, trampling through the forest chanting songs about blood and gore. Faced with isolation and hopelessness, they begin to imagine monsters, plot against one another, and attempt to recreate the society that they had grown accustomed to before the island. Only then do the children demand order and obedience, and further, begin to invent rituals of sacrifice and murder. They worship death, spitting the severed head of a pig …show more content…

When social control, the means for promoting conformity to norms, is lost, humans devolve into the most basic form of society. With one group pitted against the other, only the strongest will survive. The boys on the flight constitute a simplistic form of group. A group being composed of people in contact with one another; share some ways of thinking, feeling and behaving; and have one or more interests in common. The most fundamental common interest that binds this group together is the need to escape the island that has become their home and prison. Within their social network, the boys quickly establish a leader with the boy named Ralph. From there, a social network arises, with the asthmatic boy named piggy being at the bottom of the hierarchy. Again this finds favor with the conflict theorist, society has dubbed piggy to be of the least use, therefore he has the least power and is subject to the will of all those who have more perceived power than him. This power struggle continues and eventually erupts when conflict over power causes the group to reject Ralph as the leader and instead adopt Jack. Jack uses his authoritarian tactics to separate Ralph and Piggy from the original group, creating an in-group and an out-group. An in-group encourages intense identification and loyalty to the point where Jack has caused the remaining boys to join him in a drastic transformation from a small …show more content…

When the first social group shifts because of Jack’s deviance and rebellion, the entire society and social norms shifts along with it. Lord of the Flies is a sociological parable that attempts to demonstrate that given the wrong circumstances, humans are never too far away from our innate animal instincts. Instincts that tell us to survive and follow the leader that has the most power. It can be interpreted as a worst case scenario, or an inevitability. It is up to the viewer to interpret which one he or she views within this dystopian

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