A War Ridden Childhood: Analysis Comparing Lord of the Flies by William Golding and a Separate Peace by John Knowles

Beyond one’s personal world, there is a bigger world open to everyone. Because of how open the world is, humans are exposed to events outside of their own surroundings so much that one is bound to become influenced by these events and even begin to revolve their own thinking around the main outside influence. Lord of the Flies is about a group of young English schoolboys who all get plane wrecked on an uninhabited island and have to survive on their own until rescued. Within Lord of the Flies by William Golding, several hints of war and symbols of war are dropped periodically throughout the time that the Ralph and the boys are stuck on the island. In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, the setting is an school in America taking place during a war. The schoolboys are about juniors in high school and are being directly influenced by the ongoing war such as preparing the seniors into becoming soldiers for the war rather than the actual schooling. In conclusion, the presence of war is able to influence man into acting and doing things one is not accustomed to when war is present, because of this, the actions leads to a shadow emerging from within man and thus occurs everywhere in the world symbolizing that the personal world that is basically the whole world at hand.

An event from the outside world affects the actions of an individual. Devon in A Separate Peace beings to train the seniors into becoming soldiers and preparing for enlistment during the Summer Session when Gene and his classmates were juniors. "We were not Upper Middler exactly. For this was the Summer Session, just established to keep up with the pace of the war. We were in the shaky transit that summer from the groveling status of Lower Middlers to the near-respectabil...

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...of the Flies is basically the same concept however the actual war was in play whereas in A Separate Peace, there was not much of a literal performance of the war.

Devon and the island were both the microcosms of the world at large during their own war on the island and Devon.

The war is able to lead humans into carrying out numerous deeds they are not habituated into doing. All in all, the more linked humans are to the world, the more they are vulnerable to be influenced by the world.The immensely flexible mindset of a person has the ability to shift into his actions and thinking into deeds that relate to the supremacy. As war being present, there will always be an existence of a darker being that surfaces from within man. Evil will always reign in the world, however with a stronger influence with the hint of good will be able to alter and suppress the evil inside.