Poetry Connection Analysis for Lord of the Flies

Many important minor themes can come to mind about William Golding's Lord of the Flies, such as hostility, youth, curiousness, innocence, emptiness, primitivity, and meanness. Though this may be true, there is only one major theme of this story: civilization vs. savagery. Throughout the book, these boys battle themselves (and each other) about whether they should act civilized or primitive. Stephen Dobyn’s Bleeder is about a boy who fights the demons within himself who want to harm the handicapped boy at the camp he is counseling at. This, too can have the theme of civilization vs. savagery because of the fact that he has to refrain from being hostile and act normal. These two works of literature shares many of the same and/or similar themes.

Several relations between Lord of the Flies and Bleeder can be made, one of them being hostility. Both stories have a lot of hostility in them, and in similar ways. In the book, hostility is shown when the boys become crazy hunting machines and are sort of obsessed with killing things. In the poem, hostility is shown when the ‘normal’ kids at camp have an ongoing obsession to harm the handicapped boy. Both deal with unhealthy obsessions, and both have a negative impact on the events in the story. All of this hostility had to come from somewhere: the children’s curiosity.

Curiosity always kills the cat, and these children’s curiosity wasn’t that extreme, but it definitely wasn’t helpful. In the book, the boys curiousness about hunting and finding the ‘beastie’ is what started the blood thirsty urge to kill (Holding 35). Once they had succeeded in hunting pigs and became rather good at it, they didn’t want to stop. In the poem, the kids curiosity about what the handicapped boy was ...

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... He undid the snake-clasp of his belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood there naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water” (Holding 10). Even one of the more civilized kids had his savage-like moments. Dobyns describes himself constantly fighting the urge to cut the boy with a stick or knife because he longed to see him bleed out. This is not civilized thinking whatsoever. However, he and the other camp kids were civilized enough to know that it was unacceptable to hurt the kid because he showed no emotion, and they should have been. They had no reason to act like savages and yet, they let their weird obsessions get to them, hurting themselves and each other. This just goes to show that anything and everything can trigger the primitive savageness inside of us, but how many of us can control the urge to break ourselves down and tear ourselves apart?