Fear in Lord of the Flies by William Golding

In the novel The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a group of English schools boys are stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean. The boys’ plane crashed into the ocean in a futuristic war-ridden world. In these dire times, the boys manage to create a hierarchy and assign different roles to all of them. Throughout the novel, a human element of fear terrorizes their island society. Fear is the key element in the novel. It controls how their island society functions and it controls the boys’ actions. Fear was something that affected the adolescent school boys to a large extent by that led to the corruption and crumble of their society.
On the island, the boys feel that there is a supernatural being on the island with them. A dark side of humanity emerges within the adolescent boys. Thoughts of terror and blood manifest in the boys’ minds because of the “beastie.” The fear that the boys’ experience has affects the individual characters as well as the entire group. An example of fear overtaking reality is the encounter with the dead paratrooper, “On the mountaintop the parachute filled and moved; the figure slid, rose to its feet, spun swayed around, falling still falling it sank to the beach and the boys rushed screaming into darkness” (Golding 153). The example of the dead paratrooper demonstrates the boys’ inability to judge reality from fallacy; letting their fears overtake them. The boys did not confirm that the figure was a subhuman being but assumed that the figure was a beast. The dead paratrooper makes the boys feel that they have hard evidence that a beast is really lurking on the island with them. The boys’ inflated their ideas of a monster mainly because of movement and sounds that they saw and heard and making them ...

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...so uses fear to manipulate the others to join the group. Jack promises that “the hunters and I will protect you from the beast” (Golding 150). Jack in the novel is affected by fear itself and harnesses the power of fear for his own well being. Fear is an element of a dystopia because it makes the group of boys do things that were savage and gruesome; killing Piggy and Simon.
Fear is a very strong power that motivates the boys to act as they do and is illustrated in the novel The Lord of the Flies. Fear can make people think unclearly, argue and create power hungry dictators. The reason the boys were on the island was because of a nuclear war. The Lord of the Flies foreshadows the Cold War and the race to seek superiority by instilling fear in other nations for their own benefit. The novel illustrates that fear can make even a group of English school boys savages.