Impact of Fear: A Study Through 'Lord of the Flies'

It is often disputed whether fear is healthy or detrimental to a person's´ well being. Some say there’s such thing as a healthy amount of fear, but how much to too much? Author William Golding explores the impacts of fear in children through his novel Lord of the Flies. Through the novel the reader will come out with a general understanding that fear causes people to believe in irrational things and act in paranoid ways, even if they pretend to be okay. The idea of a ‘beast’ roaming on the island causes a deep fear in all the boys, a fear many boys pretend to be non-existent. At first the fear is caused by the idea of not being rescued, but in little time that fear transcends into something the boys have a better understanding of how to deal with, a tangible beast to fear. We first see that fear arise when the the little children begin to mention a snake like thing that one boy claims to have seen, the others littles respond by saying things like “‘He saw a the beastie, the snake-thing, and will it come back tonight?’”(36) or “‘He says in the morning it turned into them things like ropes in the trees and hung in the branches…’”(36). The fear consumes the

Simon’s death is a horrific ‘accident’ that kills whatever civil knowledge was left in the savage boys, “The beast struggled forward, broke the ring, and fell over… At once the crowd surged after it [Simon], poured down the rock, leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws”(153). They tried to destroy what they believed was the beast, unfortunately it was the opposite of a beast. The innocent boy was mercilessly killed because the others were so caught up in fear that they had no intelligent judgement left. Fear has full control of their lives and it is beginning to have extreme