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How does golding explore good and evil in lord of the flies
How does golding explore good and evil in lord of the flies
Character of Simon in Lord of the Flies
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One way that Golding shows that everyone has evil in them is by the boys’ actions. The boys on the island change from how they were when they first got there. At first, everyone was innocent and unknowing of what people can do. While away from their parents, the boys have to learn how to provide and take care of themselves. Without the proper authority to tell the boys what to do, they turn savage. They do things that normal kids their age would not have to do. The boys take joy in killing pigs. They often chant after killing a pig, “Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Bash her in!”(Golding 75). This not only shows that the boys want to kill for food, but it also shows how excited they get after killing a pig. This presents the idea that even children can kill without feeling sympathy. Golding wants the reader to know that there is evil in everyone. Different …show more content…
In this novel, Simon has the role of a religious visionary. Golding develops Simon’s character very different from the other characters. He is often excluded from the crowd. Simon symbolizes Christ. He sacrificed his life for the boys. Simon wants what is best for the boys. He does not believe in the beast as the others do. However, he believes in the beast as something else. Simon’s sight of the beast is a human at once heroic and sick (Golding 103). He does not believe in a beast with claws, as the other boys do. He wants the boys to know that the beast lies within themselves. He goes out and faces Satan or the Pig’s Head for the boys. He wants to prove to the boys that the evil is inside of themselves. On his journey up the mountain, he finds himself standing in the face of Satan. The pig’s head told him, “fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill”(Golding 143). This proves that the beast only exists inside of people. There is no physical beast to kill. Simon knew this and he was trying to save the boys. Which ultimately caused him his
This quote expands your comprehension of the beast not being an actual person nor animal but instead as the representation I explained of the beast being the boys themselves. Golding clearly Portrays that through Simon in this quote.
Simon in William Golding's Lord of the Flies At the beginning of the novel, William Golding has described Simon as 'a Christ-figure, a lover of mankind a visionary.' We first met him anonymously, he is the child of whom Jack speaks despairingly in Chapter 1. Thereafter we see more of him alone than in company, for his shyness makes it difficult for him to summon up the courage to speak publicly. Yet his affection for the other boys never wanes.
Because they have been away from organized society for such a long time, the boys of the island have become Golding's view of mankind, vile, destructive beasts.
When Simon goes to the pig, Simon starts hallucinating and thinks the pig is speaking to him and it takes on the voice of a male. Meanwhile the hunters are naked, painted and people are losing their identity. Everyone is starting to think that it would be fun to be a savage. The Lord of the Flies says to Simon that everyone is gonna become savage and kill him. Simon loses consciousness, but then later wakes up and he realizes he needs to tell everyone that there is no beast. When Simon gets to where they all are, they all crowd around Simon and start chanting. Simon screamed out about the beast but this is what happened “the beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, 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.” (Golding 153)
Simon is perhaps the most important character in the novel for he is the first and only character to come to the realization that the Beast is inside them all, and is not represented by a physical manifestation. Simon is a follower, not a leader. He believes and trusts what Ralph, his leader, says. That’s why he mentions that the beast could be inside all of them once, and immediately discards that because Ralph doesn’t think so. His confrontation with the Lord of the Flies is the only way he can liberate that information to himself. The encounter begins with “Even if he shut his eyes the sow’s head still remained like an after-image.” This represents the beginning of the fixation Simon is having on the head, thinking of it even after he shuts his eyes. Golding then points out that the pig had half shut eyes and were dim with infinite cynicism of adult life. Those details come back a little later. It’s at this point where Simon asks himself a question and answers it aloud. “ ‘I know that.’ Simon discovered that he had spoken aloud”. “He opened his eyes quickly and there was the head grinning amusedly in the strange daylight, ignoring the flies, the spilled guts, even ignoring the indignity of being spiked on a stick.” That sentence shows the continuing evolution of the fixation Simon has in this encounter. The first thing he sees when he opens his eyes is the head, and he ignores every detail around it. This is when Simon comes to the realization that his original conclusion is credible, the one he let be because of Ralph. He looks away, trying to forget the head even exists, but cannot accomplish that task.. He pulls himself back to the head “Might not the beast come for it?”, simply because he believes the Beast is not a physical manifestation, therefore being impossible for it to come. According to Simon, the head seems to agree with him. At this point, he knows the Beast doesn’t exist physically, but he is hesitant none-the-less. The head says “Run away […] go back to the others. It was a joke really—why should you bother? You were wrong, that’s all. A little headache, something you ate, perhaps. Go back, child.” Simon is making excuses for himself through the pig. Here, the fixation on the head is nearly complete.
Furthermore, Simon’s gifted power of true inner visionary to look beneath the souls is revealed, “..Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick” (112). As the boys continue to indignantly quarrel and give the beast a form and figure, Simon visualizes the beast in man himself. Thus, he loses his former innocence when he realizes the ‘darker’ side of mankind, which the boys named as the beast and understands that evil is inherent in all humans. Furthermore, his eyes represent mystical wisdom and knowledge as well as magnifying lenses to see clear pictures of the obnoxious happenings such as, “The tangle of the lines showed him the mechanics of this parody; he examined the white nasal bones, the teeth, the colours of corruption” (162). Out of all the boys present, he is the only one who receives the opportunity to see the true illusion of the beast, adding more comprehension to his understanding of the beast that the more the bitter acts of violence are committed, the more the beast will come alive on the island. This also shows his ‘superego’ personality, consisting of a fully developed mind of social and parental values. With these values, he understands the difference between the right and wrong; savage and civility and is also both naturally good willed and civilized. His identity of a keen observer appears when he comprehends that on the surface, the island is extremely peaceful and calming, but the inside is where the roots of brutality grow which slyly evoke the inner savage present in all humans. Moreover, Simon’s character also has a touch of spirituality which is revealed when he hallucinates his conversation with the Lord of the Flies, where Lord of the Flies is symbolized as the devil and Simon as Jesus. He also has a
When he reached up to the mountain, he saw the pilot’s dead body. Next to it he saw a parachute that was tangled in rocks. By seeing the parachute going up and down because of the wind, Simon realized that him and the boys had mistaken about the beast. Simon untangles the parachute, freeing the parachute from the rocks. After realizing that there is no beast, Simon starts going down the mountain towards the fire at Jack’s feast to tell the other boys about what he had just seen. Ralph and Piggy both attend the feast with the hopes to have some control over events. At the feast, the boys are laughing and eating the roasted pig. After the big meal was over, they all set in a circle by the fire. Jack orders his tribe to do their wild hunting dance. The other boys started chanting and dancing with them, even Ralph and Piggy. They decide to reenact the hunting of the pig and became very loud and energetic. suddenly , the boys saw a shadowy figure coming out of the forest (it was Simon). They didn’t recognize Simon and started yelling, “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” as stated in document D. All the boys started to tear simon apart with their bare hands and teeth. Simon tried to tell them what had happened and remind them of him but the boys were not willing to listen to him. Then suddenly the storm became worse and all the boys started run to get under
Firstly, as news spreads of the beast, all kids believe in it, but the one character who does not believe in the beast is Simon as said by the pig head. To Jack, however, it is something for him to release his inner savagery for his desire to hunt and kill. “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew didn’t you? I am a part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s a no go?’ Why things are what they are?” (Golding 158). In this situation, as the boys express their fear of the beast, Simon knows that the beast is not real and will not cause harm; however, the rest of the group thinks the exact opposite. This quote, said by the Lord of the flies (also known as the pig head) to Simon to intimidate the kids and also Jack, this proves how Jack uses the pig head to contract people’s fear, which is always used in the past because of his constant desire for hunting. In the previous quote the pig head says this to Simon referring to the third line it says that the beast is a part of every individual soul on the island. If the pig head does not get hunted down then they have a slimmer chance of getting attacked by the beast.
The beast in the story symbolizes the gradation of the morality among the boys. The compete each other becoming in the last survivor and the commander of group. The beast is not a real object which they believe if exists. They don’t realize the internal beast inside of them. Only Simon understands what the real beast is, but is killed when he tries to tell them about that. The beast mind and soul of the boys lead them to the collapse of the society. They begin killing each other and the trustworthy has lost.
On contrary from all the other boys on the island Simon, a Christ like figure in the novel, did not fear the ‘beastie’ or the unknown. “Maybe there is a beast....maybe it's only us” Simon explained. (p. 97) The fear of the unknown in the novel contributes to the boys’ terror of the beast, the beast is an imaginary figure which lays in all of the boys’ minds and haunts them. Golding uses the beast as a symbol of the evil that exists in every creature. "You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are the way they are?" The sow head announced to Simon to be the “lord of the flies”. The “lord of the flies” is a figure of the devil, and brings out all the evil and fear in people. It wants you to fear it, but if you don’t believe in the “lord of the flies” nothing can happen to you. Therefore Simon didn’t fall into the trap, but the beast killed him, meaning the other boys on the island did. Simon discovered that the beast is in fact just a dead parachute man before he died and ran down to tell the boys about his finding. When Sim...
1. After Simon is killed, the next paragraph begins, "The clouds open and let the rain down like a waterfall…" When the boys kill Simon they not only kill him and spirituality, but what they perceive to be the beast. Because the beast was created by them and embodied all of their evils, one of its interpretations can be as mankind's sin. Simon is very similar to Jesus in this book.
Is everybody born purely good inside? Or are we all filled with certain amounts of good and evil? In Lord of the Flies by William Golding a plane full of school boys lands on a deserted island, killing all the adults. With no adult supervision or civilization the boys descend back into the madness and savagery that is human nature. In Lord of the Flies by william Golding his character Simon uses spiritual power by finding out what the beast really is, showing how he failed to warn the others, how his use of the power affected the book as a whole, and how spiritual power is in the real world.
William Golding includes many messages in his book “Lord of the Flies”. One of the hidden topics he mainly focuses on throughout the text, is that of man’s inner beast. As a dispute begins to cultivate among the boys and they split off into separate groups, the boys begin to lose their sense of humanity. Piggy questions “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?” (Golding 79). This is an indication that the boys are losing sanity and their inner beast is starting to reveal itself. When Simon is alone in the jungle, the lord of the flies comes to him in the form of the pigs head. The pig’s head says to Simon that “There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast. . . . Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!
Throughout William Golding's, Lord of the Flies, many of the characters go through changes in their personality traits. From beginning to end, Simon goes through the smallest amount of change than anyone in the novel. Despite the fact that Simon did not really fit in with the other boys, he tried his hardest to make a difference in his and the other's lives.
Through the story Simon acted as the Christ Figure. The death of Simon symbolized the loss of religious reasoning. As the boys killed Simon they had let out their savage urges and acted in a cannibalistic manor. Even after the death of Simon Jack and his tribe did not feel any penitence to what they had done, killing to them had become second nature.The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe."Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!" (Golding 141).In this quote a figure had crawled out of the forest and the ring had opened to let it inside. Mistaken as the beast by the Jack's tribe, Simon was beaten to death. After the group disbanded for shelter from the storm. The storm subsided and the tides moved in and out, Simon's body was washed to sea. Here because of the storm, the darkness and fear the boys became hysterical. They acted savagely not knowing what they were doing. The boys did not take a second look to what their actions were. They had let their malicious urges control them. He cam-disguised. He may come again even though we gave him the head of our kill to eat. So watch; and be careful (Golding 148). Here Jack is warning his tribe about the beast. Not caring or taking any notice to what had taken place with Simon. Jack or his tribe does not feel any remorse for the murder they had committed, whether they realized that or not. To Jack and his tribe what they had done was a pretentious accomplishment. A death could go by their eyes blindly.