William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

In William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, Golding explores the fragility of civilization and its rules through the actions of a group of young boys stranded on an island. Golding suggests that civilization is held together by a thread, and without the rules of an organized society, the vicious nature of humanity will take over. The young boys venture further from their previous lives and natures the longer they spend unsupervised on the island. Even the characters who cling desperately to the rules of society find themselves somehow sucked into the new rituals and savagery of a life without real consequences. Golding makes these changes to the boys’ character in order to show that any human has the capacity to lose themselves when there

When Ralph acknowledges that there are no grownups on the island, “the delight of a realized ambition [overcomes] him” (8). By using the word “ambition,” Golding shows that Ralph has always longed for a life without the weight of civilization, and attempts to prove that this characteristic of Ralph is reflected in all people. Ralph then takes off his clothes, freeing himself further from the confines of society. His clothes symbolize the pressure placed upon him by parents and other adult figures, which is mirrored in the pressure placed upon all humans by the rules of civilization. While Ralph’s initial actions seem like the natural steps to be taken by any child in a world without authority, the actions of some of the other boys quickly escalate out of the realm of what many readers would like to think that they are capable of, which goes to prove Golding’s point that humans do not know what they are capable

The boys do their best to form their own society on the island based off the rules of the civilization they have been forced to leave behind. A conch shell acts as their call to arms. Arms, in this sense, means their own semi-democratic process. This process fails slowly throughout the boys’ time spent on the island. All hope seems to be lost once their group is split into two factions, and Piggy, one of the more rational and wise boys, clings desperately to the conch as a symbol of order. Moments prior to the death of Piggy, “the conch [explodes] into a thousand white fragments and [ceases] to exist” (181). The fact that the conch “explodes” as opposed to breaking or shattering and then “ceases to exist” proves the finality of the destruction of the conch and all it symbolizes. Golding uses this event as proof of the ability of civilization and order to fall apart with any great shift or change, as Piggy and the conch are both symbols of rationality and