Savagery In Lord Of The Flies

Savagery. A state of being fierce, wild, and untamed. In human life, savagery can be brought out due to a rash circumstance causing hidden feelings or actions to present themselves. But, to contrast the arrival of these secret feelings, a different force has more power over the savagery and controls these wild decisions. These desperate circumstances can bring out the best or possibly even the worst in society due to how individuals chose to react when put into an unfamiliar situation. Between, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward and Lord of the Flies by William Golding, both authors illuminate a factor that ultimately has superior control over the savagery in these savage filled novels. In both novels, an unfamiliar situation arises in which

Both authors express savagery as a character trait that in many circumstances can be hidden by a more powerful aspect, but through a power struggle between the dark and light side of the situation, often times savagery takes over and is

In Lord of the Flies, a plane full of young children crashes onto an isolated island, and they have to adapt to this unfamiliar situation and keep from the darkest savage side showing. After they land on this quiet paradise with no admirable grown figure, they quickly realize they need to establish rules, Golding states, "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" (17). These children that have been put in a stressful situation and still trust their instinct to try to stay civilized and follow rules. Because of human nature and how humans choose to react to certain situations, this should have been a savage and chaotic event, but instead, these young children tamed the darkness in them and decide to establish boundaries to follow. This shows how mature these children are, and how weak savagery is when put up to a more capable trait that has the ability to override the true inhumanity inside of us. Oppositely, one of the rules the group makes is to kill the island pigs in order to have food. Since the rules show the connection back to civilization, at first Jack is not able to turn on his old life and kill a living,