Lord of the Flies is a novel about the evil nature of humans, and all of the characters within the novel are boys. Most likely, many people are curious as to why Golding chose to include exclusively boys in his novel. In nature, more times than not, males tend to behave more dominantly and viciously. Which is why establishing the setting in a place where the boys must survive, and be led will easily bring out the worst in the boys. Having them return to their natural state of being savages. Golding only uses males in the novel, and the reasoning behind him doing so is he believes males tend to be more belligerent, which can cause them to turn to evil faster than females. For a very long time males and females were each given two different …show more content…
roles, males should go to school and work while females should remain at home and not work. The reason for this being, “because of differences in processing certain brain chemicals, males on average tend to be less inclined to sit still for as long as females and tend to be more physically impulsive” (Jantz). Which seemed to have led many people to believe it would be more effective overall for males to go to work and do labor as they prefer to be more active instead of females. A common gender stereotype is that males tend to be more aggressive while females tend to be more mild-mannered.
In Lord of the Flies the boys start off as civilized humans but the longer the boys remain on the island the more they lose their humanity and turn into savages. At the beginning of the novel the boys are making plans on how they will survive and cooperate on the island, “We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make a fire” (Golding 33). At that point in the novel the boys are hoping that they will get rescued so they perform tasks such as making a fire on top of a mountain, so if anyone passes the island they know that they are there. Yet, as the story comes to an end and a ship comes to rescue the boys they cry, “Simon was dead-and Jack had...The tears began to flow and sobs shook him-and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too” (Golding 186). At this point in the novel Simon and Piggy had been murdered due to the savage behavior of the boys, and when the person comes to rescue the boys that is when Ralph realizes the gravity of the evils they had committed on the island and …show more content…
cries. While the boys are isolated on the island they commit many evils giving evidence to “Freud’s theory that children are little savages, that no child is innocent” (Rosenfield).
Although, this theory by Freud does not exclude females. It is extremely common for people to be more open to boys expressing their anger, while more times than not girls are taught at a young age to not express their anger and any other types of similar feelings, “While boys can be taught that aggression is not always a bad thing, Dr. Caplan says that girls are taught to suppress aggression because of their role in child-rearing and the undesirability of expressing aggression toward children” (Nelson). This provides more evidence as to why it would make more sense to only include boys in Lord of the Flies. Even if the girls were feeling angry or frustrated, they may try to hide or ignore those feelings in order to avoid appearing
hostile. A strong factor as to why females tend to be less violent than boys is, “Men have been encouraged to be more overt with their anger. If [boys] have a conflict on the playground, they act it out with their fists. Girls have been encouraged to keep their anger down” (Dittman). This alone makes boys more susceptible to crime, because many of them are raised to believe that they should use violence instead of reason to solve their problems, 78.8% of men have been charged with some type of criminal offense and 88.7% of men have been charged for murder or manslaughter while 11.3% of women had been charged for murder or manslaughter (U.S. Department of Justice). The statistics show that violent crimes are more often than not performed by men, enforcing how aggression can be such a strong trait in males and not females making females less susceptible to become savage if they were in the same situation as the boys in Lord of the Flies. Overall, the characters in Lord of the Flies are all male because it makes the message Golding is trying to send more powerful. If there had been any females on the island with the boys she would be expected to help the boys maintain their humanity, but with there being exclusively boys on the island. A battle of dominance easily arises as it is a common stereotype that males tend to be more dominant and aggressive than females, so if it were all females on the island it may feel too unrealistic for the girls to turn savage, but for the young boys an aura of evil and power resonates strongly.
The boys on the island in Lord of The Flies lost all hope,
A group of kids got stuck on an island after their plane got shot down and they all have many different personalities. Being stuck on an island usually brings out the worst of people.But, there were two characters in novel, “The Lord of The Flies” that had good morals. These two characters were Ralph and Simon. Ralph and Simon weren’t intimidated by not having any adults around, instead, they tried to bring out the best of themselves and not take part in any horseplay the rest of the boys did.
In Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Simon and Piggy are among a group of boys who become stranded on a deserted island. Left without any adults, the boys attempt to create an orderly society. However, as the novel progresses, the boys struggle to sustain civility. Slowly, Jack and his hunters begin to lose sight of being rescued and start to act more savagely, especially as fears about a beast on the island spread. As the conflict progresses, Jack and Ralph battle for power. The boys’ struggle with the physical obstacles of the island leads them to face a new unexpected challenge: human nature. One of the boys, Simon, soon discovers that the “beast” appears not to be something physical, but a flaw within all humans
In Lord of the Flies, a group of boys are stranded on a deserted island. It starts out fine, until one of the boys, Jack, becomes jealous that he isn’t in charge. He forms a separate tribe. One night they start a war type of dance, chanting and screaming. They mistake Simon for the beast and kill him screaming “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” (Goulding 138) After the boys realize they had killed Simon, they realized that who else would give them hope that they could survive, and keep the peace around the island. After Simon died Jack started to gain more power, because Ralph had lost a valuable member of his
In the “Lord of the Flies” savagery gets the best of the boys. The boys have lost their humanity and let things get out of hands and ended up killing an innocent boy who they thought was a beast. “There was no laughter at all now and more grave watching. Ralph pushed both hands through his hair and looked at the little boy in mixed amusement and exasperation.”
Golding's motives for choosing the island setting for the novel, Lord of the Flies was to have the characters isolated, where the laws of their governments could not reach them. The boys on the island represented a microcosm of world society. Golding chose children because they have not yet been fully conditioned by society to understand right from wrong, and thus are guided by their instinct and what is inherent within them. Golding uses a great deal of symbolism throughout the novel. Different characters provide different symbols. Jack is a symbol of savagery and anarchy. Golding relates the inherent evil with Jack to the evil and cruelty of the larger world, which we all share.
Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Golding in 1954 about a group of young British boys who have been stranded alone together on an island with no adults. During the novel the diverse group of boys struggle to create structure within a society that they constructed by themselves. Golding uses many unique literary devices including characterization, imagery, symbolism and many more. The three main characters, Ralph, Piggy, and Jack are each representative of the three main literary devices, ethos, logos, and pathos. Beyond the characterization the novel stands out because of Golding’s dramatic use of objective symbolism, throughout the novel he uses symbols like the conch, fire, and Piggy’s glasses to represent how power has evolved and to show how civilized or uncivilized the boys are acting. It is almost inarguable that the entire novel is one big allegory in itself, the way that Golding portrays the development of savagery among the boys is a clear representation of how society was changing during the time the novel was published. Golding is writing during
As much as everyone would like to believe that all people are inherently good, the illusion of innocence that is often presumed throughout childhood makes the revelation of human nature especially hard to bear. Arthur Koestler said, “Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion”, and this one is certainly a very hard reality to cope with. In the novel Lord of the Flies, the author William Golding tells the story of a group of British schoolboys who crash land on an uninhabited island in the midst of a world war, and how they regress from civilization to savagery. By conveying Ralph’s reactions to the deaths of Simon and Piggy, providing detailed, symbolic imagery of the cliffs and the lagoon, and showing Ralph’s despair at his new understanding
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
In Lord of the Flies, William Golding expresses the idea that humans are naturally immoral, and that people are moral only because of the pressures of civilization. He does this by writing about a group of boys, and their story of survival on an island. The civilized society they form quickly deteriorates into a savage tribe, showing that away from civilization and adults, the boys quickly deteriorate into the state man was millions of years ago. This tendency is shown most in Jack, who has an animalistic love of power, and Roger, who loves to kill for pleasure. Even the most civilized boys, Ralph and Piggy, show that they have a savage side too as they watch Simon get murdered without trying to save him. Simon, the only one who seems to have a truly good spirit, is killed, symbolizing how rare truly good people are, and how quickly those personalities become corrupted.
Throughout Lord of the Flies is a display of humankind’s thirst for power. Most of the boys, for example, transition to savagery and animalistic behaviors to free themselves from powerless lives. Jack, the leader of the hunters, becomes the first of the boys to paint a mask on his face. “Jack planned his new face. He made one cheek and one eye-socket white, then he rubbed over the other half of his face and slashed a black bar of charcoal across from right ear to left jaw…Beside the pool his sinewy body held up a mask that drew their eyes and appalled them. He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness,” (63-64). Under his mask, Jack feels no shame, and therefore is free to indulge in power as he desires. In fact, later in the book, Jack and a few other boys commit one of the ultimate crimes of violence and power—rape (although only metaphorically.) Jack...
In the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a group of young boys from England are evacuated out of their country due to a war. The plane is then shot down and results into a plane crash on a deserted island. The boys are left all alone with no adults, no supplies, and no one to come and rescue them. They are all on their own and have to establish a new “society”. The boys have to choose someone to govern them and that person ends up being Ralph, who had an internal struggle between what is right and wrong closer to the end of the novel. The boys turn into savages, killing each other, and showing their evil inside each of them. According to, William Golding man is inherently evil, evil is in all of us, but it is oppressed by society, and comes out when there is not anything to hold us back, civilization is what holds back evil from coming out, or it is what triggers evil inside of man.
True Portrayal of Children in Lord of the Flies & nbsp; In the novel The Lord of the Flies, by. William Golding, one can see how children react to certain situations. Children, when given the opportunity, would choose to play and have fun. rather than to do boring, hard work. Also, when children have no other adults to look up to, they turn to other children for leadership. Finally, children stray towards savagery when they are without adult authority. Therefore, Golding succeeds in effectively portraying the interests and attitudes of young children in this novel.
William Golding's first book, Lord of the Flies, is the story of a group of boys of different backgrounds who are marooned on an unknown island when their plane crashes. As the boys try to organize and formulate a plan to get rescued, they begin to separate and as a result of the dissension a band of savage tribal hunters is formed. Eventually the "stranded boys in Lord of the Flies almost entirely shake off civilized behavior: (Riley 1: 119). When the confusion finally leads to a manhunt [for Ralph], the reader realizes that despite the strong sense of British character and civility that has been instilled in the youth throughout their lives, the boys have backpedaled and shown the underlying savage side existent in all humans. "Golding senses that institutions and order imposed from without are temporary, but man's irrationality and urge for destruction are enduring" (Riley 1: 119). The novel shows the reader how easy it is to revert back to the evil nature inherent in man. If a group of well-conditioned school boys can ultimately wind up committing various extreme travesties, one can imagine what adults, leaders of society, are capable of doing under the pressures of trying to maintain world relations.
The novel Lord of the Flies was full of challenges that the boys overcame in order to survive. Conflicts within themselves, with nature and with each other constantly test the children’s ability to endure. Struggles against the natural elements of the island, rival groups or fear of the unknown continually appear throughout the story. Some of the boys on the island did not survive the quarrels that they faced. They perished because they were lacking something that the surviving boys did not. The survivors had a natural primal instinct or a physical or mental advantage over the boys who did not make it. ‘Only the strong survive’ is an important element that runs through the novel Lord of the Flies because in order to survive the boys must turn to their primitive instincts of physical strength and savagery.