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How Does Golding Portray Children In Lord Of The Flies

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Lord of the Flies is a novel about the activities of some schoolboys who ranged between six and twelve and who had been dropped by an aeroplane on an uninhabited island. The subject matter of the novel shows similarities with the adventurous stories written in the 19th century. Those stories are romantic tales which stress on the discovery of the unknown land by the boys who are away from the Christian notion of original sin. But Lord of the Flies is a reconstruction of Ballantyne's Coral Island in which three British–school boys find out an uninhabited island which becomes a paradise for them. Golding does not share the romantic ideas that portray children the status of innocent angels. According to him, children possess both good qualities …show more content…

Rather, it is the result of the author's microscopic observation of the changes in the thoughts of the boys and their ways of life. Even the skilled changes in their behavior do not decamp his eyes. The investigation by the author of the complex phenomenon called child becomes interesting because he makes this investigation fair and objective, and detects the psychological complexity through symbols. For instance, when Ralph threw his school uniform and felt comfortable in the tropical atmosphere, the gesture expressed his delight of freedom, as he was sure that there would be no strict discipline on the island (Bernard, 1965: …show more content…

His view of human civilization that appears largely in the background of the children's world on the island, apparently offers no flicker of hope. The different aspects of the adult's world as reflected in Lord of the Flies may be discussed in the following way: first, there was the atomic war that presupposed the school children dropped on an uninhabited island; secondly, occasional references to bomb, firing and so on, that point at the cruelty of the grown-up people; thirdly, the fluffy suggestions of the boy's unhappy family life and lastly, the presentation of chauvinism as the remains of colonial feelings mirrored in the naval officer's speech at the end (Santwana, 2010:

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