William Golding’s Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of young british schoolboys who must learn to survive together when their plane crashes onto a deserted island. At the beginning of the book, the boys are young and childish, and some believe that their stay on the island is just a game. However, as the novel progresses and the boys decide to act violently, their personalities turn from young and innocent to brutal and vicious. They lose all sense of their innocent childhoods and their innocuous personalities deteriorate. Golding shows how loss of innocence occurs when young boys have to act like grownups, causing them to act rashly and violently, hurting those around them. At the beginning of the book, Jack has his innocence, …show more content…
and when he is faced with the challenge of bringing the boys meat, he can’t kill the pig. However, over time, his innocence dissolves within him and later is able kill the pig. He is extremely proud of his ability to assassinate the pig, especially because he at first could not. At the beginning of the story, Jack cannot bring himself to kill the pig because he still has his childhood and sense of innocence. In the first passage, he is unable to be so brutal as to murder the pig. In the second passage, he can murder the pig because his innocence is gone. He swung back his right arm and hurled the spear with all his strength. From the pig-run came the quick, hard patter of hoofs, a castanet sound, seductive, maddening—the promise of meat. He rushed out of the undergrowth and snatched up his spear. The pattering of pig’s trotters died away in the distance.” (Golding, 52) “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.” Yet as the words became audible, the procession reached the steepest part of the mountain, and in a minute or two the chant had died away. Piggy snivelled and Simon shushed him quickly as though he had spoken too loudly in church. Jack, his face smeared with clays, reached the top first and hailed Ralph excitedly, with lifted spear. “Look! We’ve killed a pig—we stole up on them—we got in a circle—” Voices broke in from the hunters. “We got in a circle—” “We crept up—” “The pig squealed—” (Golding, 74-5) At first, innocent, young Jack cannot kill the pig because of the little child that he is.
As he grows on the island, he later understands how, and becomes excited to, kill a pig because he is no longer the innocent boy that he once was. From acting as an adult to providing for the boys, Jack has become less and less of an innocent child.“Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.” (Golding, 75) Golding uses repetition to show that Jack is very proud of his killing of the pig - because it marks his “adulthood.” Jack’s pride is reinforced by the repetition of this phrase. After this, Jack can kill the pig with ease every time he is faced with an opportunity to. At the beginning of the book, Jack cannot kill the pig because he is still a young and innocent boy. His responsibility, in leading the tribe and giving them orders, only appears once his innocence is gone. Jack is one of the first boys to forget his innocence, but as the book goes on, more and more boys begin to grasp the idea of power and forget who they used to …show more content…
be. The boys continue to lose their innocence as they kill one of their friends on the island: Simon. The boys are charged by their triumph in killing the pig, and savagely chant about their pride. However, when Simon tries to tell them that the beast is a hoax, they mistake him for the beast and kill him. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill…At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore... 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 shower over the struggling heap on the sand. (Golding, 175) Golding shows how the boys find their cruelty and savagery as they kill one of their friends. Golding uses imagery to add to the overall tone of the passage, causing the passage to seem dark and menacing. The boys are essentially murdering their close friend and losing their innocence, which is a very dark idea. Golding uses “abominable” and “struck, bit, tore.” These words tone the passage to make it seem dark and gloomy: matching the tone of losing innocence. Golding creates an environment that is no longer a bright and tropical island, but a dark and menacing threat. The boys have turned to violence as a norm rather than a test of bravery; they no longer are the innocent boys that they were before the island. As the book comes to a close, Ralph figures out the loss of innocence that has occurred to the boys. The book ends with the boys leaving the island without their innocence. Ralph, realizing this, is saddened at the fact that violence turned from a way to be brave to a social norm. The book ends with the boys are rescued by naval officers. The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. (Golding, 234-235) Golding describes the emotion that comes with growing up.
Ralph is showing that the boys have lost all their innocence because the island forced them to take care of themselves. They no longer are the little boys they were; they have been exposed to violence. They feel guilty because of all the horrible things they have done, but also relief because they no longer need to be violent, as a result of leaving the island. Ralph, realizing that the boys have changed from the young innocent boys that they were into brutal men, cries for the “end of innocence.” The metaphor “darkness of a man’s heart” expresses the guilt the boys felt, and the violence that they experienced. Golding uses the metaphor to make the passage seem dark and grim. The “darkness” of the island could have changed the boys from innocent to violent and guilt-ridden. Losing innocence by turning to violence is a dark idea, and Golding’s metaphors support and convey that sadness. Ralph cries because he is upset that he knows that the boys have changed from the innocent boys that they were to horrible, violent men with more awful experiences than any boy should
have. Throughout Lord of the Flies, the boys turn towards violence in order to survive, leading to their loss of innocence and growth of sin. William Golding shows how misdeeds and evil occur when the boys feel the need to be violent. Through savage behaviors such as brutally murdering the pig or killing their friend Simon, the boys collapse from inexperienced boys into men lacking all innocence. They are exposed to a life without the guiding hand of adults, and because of this, they descend into savagery. Golding says that in the world, young people will naturally turn to violence without the help from adults the promise of protection. Although violence can occur as a result of hatred, it can also happen because of people not knowing what else to turn to.
William Golding, the author of the novel The Lord of the Flies, lived through the global conflicts of both world wars. World War II shifted his point of view on humanity, making him realize its inclination toward evilness. His response to the ongoing struggle between faith and denial became Lord of the Flies, in which English schoolboys are left to survive on their own on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. Just like Golding, these boys underwent the trauma of war on a psychological level. Ralph, one of the older boys, stands out as the “chief,” leading the other victims of war in a new world. Without the constraints of government and society, the boys created a culture of their own influenced by their previous background of England.
Ralph is the novel’s protagonist and tries to maintain the sense of civility and order as the boys run wild. Ralph represents the good in mankind by treating and caring for all equally, which is completely opposite of Jack’s savage nature. Jack is the antagonist in the novel and provokes the most internal evil of all the boys. Jack is seen at first as a great and innocent leader but he becomes t...
William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of The flies’ presents us with a group of English boys who are isolated on a desert island, left to try and retain a civilised society. In this novel Golding manages to display the boys slow descent into savagery as democracy on the island diminishes.
In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, he portrays the theme of innocence to evil to prove that everybody has the potential to release the savagery within them. The boys lose their sense of control from their beginnings on the island, to the breakdown of their society, to the tragedies that unfolded their civilization. A final thought on why it gets as chaotic as it does is that they had no grownups around them to keep order safe and sane, and to protect them. Also every single argument they had never got resolved which makes matters much worse. William Golding uses the murders of all the pigs, Simon and Piggy to show how different the boys have become since they landed on the island. A few words to describe the boys throughout their progression on the island is either savages or barbaric.
Golding shows the drastic change in the boys’ behavior using symbolic dialogue and the characters’ actions. At the beginning of the story, Ralph puts Jack in charge of hunting so the boys can eat some meat. Jack finds a pig while hunting, yet he cannot kill it, his reason being, “because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting living flesh; because of the unbearable blood” (31). Because of the strictly regulated society Jack has grown up in, he finds it disturbing to kill an animal, even if he must do it to have food.
William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of The Flies’ tells the story of a group of English boys isolated on a desert island, left to attempt to retain civilisation. In the novel, Golding shows one of the boys, Jack, to change significantly. At the beginning of the book, Jack’s character desires power and although he does not immediately get it, he retains the values of civilized behaviour. However, as the story proceeds, his character becomes more savage, leaving behind the values of society. Jack uses fear of the beast to control the other boys and he changes to become the book’s representation of savagery, violence and domination. He is first taken over with an obsession to hunt, which leads to a change in his physical appearance This change of character is significant as he leads the other boys into savagery, representing Golding’s views of there being a bad and unforgiving nature to every human.
William Golding, the author of the highly-acclaimed book, The Lord of the Flies took the reader into a world where underage boys live in an uncharted island with no adults no other human contact; just themselves and finding ways to survive and to get off the island. However, that is no easy task, Golding shed some ground-breaking light on how really boys will act with no authority in their lives and the term “boys will be boys” will arise. The boys were placed in a situation where they were force to act a certain way of nature and condition. In consequence, the boys’ savage and immoral behavior shown is to be blamed on the situation/environment nurtured factors. For new readers who starts to read the book they witness the boys into a sort
It’s one of the most famous stories to ever exist, the story of how two people changed what defines us as humans. It’s the story of Adam, Eve, a serpent, and the unbecoming of mankind, the Fall of Man. This iconic account has been the premise for many works over the centuries. Today, Lord of the Flies by William Golding is considered one of the most influential novels of our time, not only for its adventurous story of stranded boys on a lost island, but also because of its allegorical tale of the true fault in man’s soul. William Golding leans heavily upon the Biblical account of the Fall of Man to highlight man’s depravity in his novel, Lord of the Flies.
As Ralph is trying to hide from them overnight, he wonders, “Might it not be possible to walk boldly into the fort… pretend they were still boys, schoolboys who had said, ‘Sir, yes, sir’- and worn caps? Daylight might have answered yes; but darkness and the horrors of death said no” (186). No matter how hard Ralph tries, he cannot discard his new knowledge of Jack and his tribe’s potential for evil and corruption. For a long time Ralph seems to be in denial; like many others, he seems to want to stay true to his belief in the overall goodness of the human heart. Ralph’s expectations for human kindness are finally challenged to the point of irreversibility when Jack attacks him and tries to pursue him on a vicious manhunt. When Ralph collapses on the beach and a naval officer arrives, “With filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, [and] the darkness of man’s heart...” (202). One might think it strange that rather than rejoicing over rescue, Ralph and the rest of the boys cry out in grief. The young schoolboys come to understand the enormity of human greed and evil, and unfortunately it is a lesson that they will not be able to ignore or forget. They witness and play a role in their own loss of innocence, and the time they spend on the island teaches them what
In the novel The Lord of the flies, William Golding illustrates the decline from innocence to savagery through a group of young boys. In the early chapters of The Lord of the Flies, the boys strive to maintain order. Throughout the book however, the organized civilization Ralph, Piggy, and Simon work diligently towards rapidly crumbles into pure, unadulterated, savagery. The book emphasized the idea that all humans have the potential for savagery, even the seemingly pure children of the book. The decline of all civilized behavior in these boys represents how easily all order can dissolve into chaos. The book’s antagonist, Jack, is the epitome of the evil present in us all. Conversely, the book’s protagonist, Ralph, and his only true ally, Piggy, both struggle to stifle their inner
Jack has always been an ill-natued boy even from the start of the book when he told Piggy to "Shut up, Fatty." (p.23). Dispite Jack’s unpleasent personality, his lack of courage and his conscience preventing him from killing the first pig they encountered. "They knew very well why he hadn’t; because of the enormity of the knife decending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood." (p.34)
Jack begins the novel partially innocent, cruel enough to yell at the boys yet pure enough to hesitate when faced with the task of killing the pig. Jack obtains the tools necessary to kill the pig, yet claims to need help cornering the animal. Jack, not truly needing help to kill the pig but rather needing the support provided by the mob mentality, acquires the support of his choir and together the boys hunt and kill the pig, all the while chanting, “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood”...
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies shows man’s inhumanity to man. This novel shows readers good vs. evil through children. It uses their way of coping with being stranded on an island to show us how corrupt humans really are.
Loss of innocence occurs throughout the novel. Piggy realizes the change between innocence and savagery when he questions, “What are we? Human? Or animal? Or savages?” (Golding 79). Simon soon follows when he states, “What I mean is…...maybe it’s only us” (Golding 89). Both boys realize the true beast is the group and they end up paying for the uncontrolled actions of others with their lives. The drastic change between civilization on the island causes the group to become savage and feed off of violence. When Golding writes, “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (Golding 202), Ralph shows his understanding that they need adult authority in their lives and Piggy was the one trying to warn him. Ralph starts to think, “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away” (Golding 91), when the group starts to lose innocence along with civilization. The late realization adds to the theme of civilization vs savagery and drives the plot to loss of
In most societies, adults play a lead role in maintaining civilization. In William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, there is no adult guidance which drives the children to spiral out of control. No authority means there are no consequences for bad behavior; therefore the children were not afraid of getting in trouble for the things that they were doing. When fear of “The Beast” takes over the island, it begins to possess the boys and motivates them to do whatever they need to feel empowered and accepted. The boys’ fear of a higher power and lack of adult supervision urges them to kill two of the smartest and most innocent children on the island in search of respect from the other boys. In order to remain alive on the island the boys must compete for their lives. The innocent are bullied, and do not survive. The savagery that Golding presents his readers with in Lord of the Flies is still present in modern day society. Children lacking parental guidance tend to act out of their normal human nature as seen in Golding’s Lord of the Flies and, the Columbine Shootings.