Savagery In Lord Of The Flies

According to Jose Ortega y Gasset, “Savagery is the process of separation”. This is true in the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, when airplane of young boys crashes onto a desolate island. Two young boys named Ralph and Jack engage in a fight for power from the beginning when Ralph is voted chief by the boys. They try to establish a society by creating a fire for rescue and a democracy with rules, but eventually, as the boys forget their civilization back home they get trapped by savagery. In Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, the boy’s hair and the signal fire are symbols which show that even with attempts to stay civilized, as rules are forgotten and not rigorously enforced, people will devolve into chaos.

Once on the island,

Golding described, “The rest were shock-headed, but Piggy’s hair still lay in wisps over his head as though baldness were his natural state…” (69). The author opts to utilize descriptive vocabulary such as “shock-headed” which indicates the boys have shaggy, mangy, long, unkempt hair. Golding could have simply said basic adjectives to describe the hair, but instead, he adds to the style of his writing by choosing a more interesting phrase. This creates imagery along with the phrase “lay in wisps over his head”. These details create a clear image that further depicts the symbol of savagery that the hair represents. Most of the boy's hair is growing out of control along with their savage nature but Piggy’s hair is remaining the same. Piggy is not being affected by the loss of rules and order unlike his companions on the island. In contrast to Piggy, Ralph is being affected by the lack of enforced guidelines and the defiance against them. His changing hair is symbolic of his changing character. When Ralph is running away from Jack’s tribe, “His hair was full of dirt and tapped like the tendrils of a creeper”(212). The simile “tapped like the tendrils of a creeper” is comparing Ralph's hair to a special stem of the winding vines in the forest. This describes his hair as being stringy and winding around in the same manner the vines covering the forest are tangled. This simile emphasizes the idea that savagery is entangling Ralph. In addition, Ralph was described as having fair, white hair at the beginning of the novel, which is a color associated with purity. Now his hair is “full of dirt”, which symbolizes that he is becoming tainted and stained, straying from his original pureness. Ralph attempts to stay clean but struggles with the burden of savagery approaching him. Golding explained, “He would like to have a pair of scissors and cut this hair- he flung the mass