Nick Hose
Ms. Tantlinger
Honors English 10
2 January 2018
The Power of Society over the Fear and Control of its People
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a fictional work about the struggle of good and evil in man. It uses a group of British boys to show the deterioration of one’s innocence through savagery and slaughter.The boys are forced to maintain order on a deserted island where adults do not exist to maintain it. As the protagonist, Ralph, tries to keep the order and be rescued, the antagonist, Jack, wants to only have fun and hunt for meat. Ralph and Jack fight for the control of the boys, which leads to the rise of darkness and the death of a few boys. Golding shows that through the deaths of Simon and Piggy, social
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Without Simon, Ralph is terrified of a beast and is helpless to the power of darkness. The shift into a darker fear leaves the boys vulnerable to the evils of the island. Ralph’s courage breaks down when the fears of death begin to overwhelm his mind. Ralph and Piggy begin to detach themselves from civilization when they decide to keep relations with the savages. Piggy and Ralph are “eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society”(Golding 152) until the savages begin to act like animals. The savages “screamed, struck, bit, tore”(Golding 153) like a predator on weak, bloodied Simon until he died. The savages commit this crime because they are afraid of the unknown and believe death is the remedy to this fear. With the emotions of death swirling around in Ralph’s head, his mind comes back to civilization to exclaim, “that was murder”(Golding 156). Ralph becomes the only biggun capable of understanding that darkness has plagued the boys, and the fear it brings with it, making the boys more and more detached from society. Even Piggy justifies the murder of Simon, showing he too has become corrupted. The fear of being a murderer finally surfaces in Ralph’s mind and he cries, “I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. Oh God, I want to go home”(Golding 157). Ralph has began to lose courage and this is the first time Ralph is shown to be terrified by the fear of what the boys have become. Golding adds this to show
The novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, is a story about a group of British school boys that get stuck on an island after they crash on a plane. They are forced to use the resources around them and have to trust each other, and it works out for a while, but while you read on, you begin to recognize a strain between the two main characters, Jack and Ralph, which really spins out of control at the end. William Golding uses British school boys for this novel because those kind of boys are well mannered and don’t seem like the kind of people to turn into uncultured savages. They are expected to have manners and common etiquette. He uses an example of social commentary by using the little ‘uns in the book as not being able to take care of themselves, and that is supposed to represent the society that we live in, that we can’t take care of ourselves without help. Foreshadowing is subtle, uses unimportant details to lead up to the climaxes of the novel, and is the basis of good vs. evil during the novel.
One of the biggest forms of adversity with which the boys struggled was undoubtedly learning to cope and overcome the fear the littluns had instilled upon themselves associated with ‘the beast’. Golding does this by changing the way Ralph handles the crisis and changing his basic survival instincts back to that of the society the boys have left behind and learn to be compassionate towards the obviously scared young boys. This is obvious because throughout the book Ralph has been harsh, we can see this most in the first few chapters where he himself is obviously scared at the prospect of surviving with no adult help or guidance, we can see this through the way Golding has made Ralph speak and react to the other characters, such as his harshness to another key figure in the book, Piggy. An example of this is the fact that Ralph continuously tells Piggy to ‘Shut up’. However, when he understands the littluns fear of ‘the beast’, his tone softens and he understands that they need to be protected and looked after to feel safe, this is obvious because he made sure
Ralph represents order and discipline, while Jack represents an unhealthy drive for power and savagery. In the beginning of the novel, Ralph is voted the leader of the group and attempts to make life on the island disciplined and civilized, like their life in England. However, throughout the novel Jack rivals Ralph’s leadership role, attempting to overthrow him. As the boys’ savage impulses increase, more of them begin to side with Jack instead of going with Ralph. As Ralph loses his hold over the boys, almost all of them begin to act violently and barbaric. An example of this is when the children of the island murder Simon for no justifiable reason. Even Piggy and Ralph partake in the murder, showing that the violent human impulse is in
It’s the years following World War II, and tension is high. A group a British school boys needed to crash their plane in the ocean and swim to the shore of an uninhabited island. The island have pigs, water, and other valuable resources they need in order to survive. Once they appear on the island, they decided to set up rules and laws to govern their miniature society. A twelve year old boy disagrees with the laws they had originally set up and a rebellion starts to brew within the group. Now the trouble begins. This is the plot line of the book The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Golding claims that fear brings out the worst in people. These rules, originally made for their own comfort, can be compromised by fear. In the case of the The Lord of the Flies, the children fear a creature called beastie. Fear can cause chaos and make people doing things they don’t normally do. The fear brings out the worst in people and it starts with beastie and leads to a the rebellion of Jack, and the demise of Simon and Piggy.
the novel the Lord of the Flies, fear is the root of the trouble that
Fear impacts everyone. For some individuals, fear comes in a good form; it pushes one to achieve success. But for others, it can be dangerous and a continuous burden. In William Golding’s novel, “Lord of the Flies”, the boys’ suspicion of the island and those that roam it, is the downfall in to savagery. The boys first decide to paint their faces, followed by trying to show their aggression to the beast, breaking rules, openly admitting to carelessness, metaphorically raping a mother pig, and remaining naked although they had clothes. Over the course of a few weeks, the boys slowly demonstrated fear and evolved in to uncultured beasts.
What effect does fear in the novel Lord of the Flies have on the human ability to control impulses and instincts?
The bogeyman is a make believe character that goes around to everyone's beds or closets. It makes people overreact and makes them run in fear, which can be destructive. This is like in the book lord of the flies when they get frightened of the so Called beast. And so there by making fear a destructive emotion.
After finding out the true beast, Ralph finally begins to cry about everything that had happened while on the island. He discovered new ideas about human nature and faced the evil in others firsthand. He watched as law and order ceased to exist and the other boys turned into savages, losing all sense of civilized behavior. He discovered the real beast; darkness, savagery, and evil inside human
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a gritty allegory of adolescence, innocence, and the unspoken side of human nature. Countless social issues are portrayed, however one of the most reoccurring is the nature of man. Throughout the novel there is an ever-present focus on the loss of innocence amongst the boys, shown by the deterioration of social skills and their retrogression into a barbaric form of society. Also portrayed is the juxtaposition of a cruel, evil main character and a more classically good counterpart, and their eternal rivalry for power and authority over their younger subjects. Does society or the lack thereof create evil in human nature, or simply magnify a pre-existing
Fear, we’ve all experienced it, wither we had nightmares, terrible thoughts of the monster under the bed or any anxiety about an obstacle you face. Fear is essential to humanity’s survival instinct, it’s what drives humans to kill animals, in fear of no food. However, fear can be used as a tool of evil, for example in the novel fear drove the boys into descending savagery. Fear started out in Lord of the Flies with a nightmare, like most children do have, but it all spiraled out of control. A moment in chapter 2 Pg 46 Piggy talking to a littlun; “He wants to know what you’re going to do about the snake-thing?”, was the precise moment where fear was introduced to the boys. The only possible way that seed of fear would’ve been undone was prevented
Golding uses the characters from Lord of the Flies just as Shakespeare did to prove that man is turned to evil. The narrative illustrates a story about a group of British boys who get stranded on a deserted island without any adults. This lack of a stable society and presence of leadership forces the boys to create their own, and this works for the boys for a while. The boys turn themselves into savages and begin to do evil deeds which continue to get worse until they are rescued. In the time between their rescue, the society the boys create devolves and turns them into savages although this was not always the case. When the boys first arrived, Ralph, the fair haired boy, attempts to lead them in a civilized manner, but through the influence of Jack, many of the boys become evil. Jack mutants against Ralph saying, “ I'm not going to be a part of Ralph lot... I'm going off by myself. He can catch his own pigs. Anyone who wants to hunt when I do can come too,” (Golding 127) in saying this Jack has made most of the boys on the island betray their leader which proves both Jack and his followers to be evil. The society the boys created glorifies violence and death:“... the boys… found themselves eager to take part in this demented… society.” (Golding 152). Jack, the leader of the violent tribe, often takes his followers on gruesome hunts on which they graphicly disembowel the kill, and after the hunt, Jack leads a chant while the other boys stand
This reminds Jack and Ralph that there is a chance that the beast is real and there may be reason for all the fear. It also reveals that Simon's character is very much in touch with reality. He is not trying to push the fact that a beast could be on the island away from him. He is trying to deal with his fear and show the others that they can and should deal with theirs.
Despite the fact that Jack’s fear of not being chief ends badly, Ralph’s fear of not surviving has another whole level of bad endings. Ralph’s main concern when the boys crash into the island is being rescued, but because of this, he neglects other problems such as looking out for littluns. “’That litte’un – ‘gasped Piggy – ‘him with the mark of his face, I don’t see him. Where is he now?’” (Golding 46). Ralph is so blinded by the idea of being rescued that he forgets his priorities. He should be watching the littluns, but instead, he is being selfish and cares only about the fire. As a consequence to his poor action, an innocent life is taken away. Also when a ship comes by and Ralph realizes that the hunters let the fire out, he loses it and he yells at Jack, but “his voice was loud and savage, and struck them into silence. ‘There was a ship’” (Golding 74). This is the first time that Ralph shows any sign of savagery, which tells the readers that evil and savageness is
Ralph explains that after Simons death, the young boys not only had to fear the chance of survival and fear the high probability that they would be there until they died also ended up fearing