Lord of the Flies

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At a skim through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the reader discovers an adventurous story of English schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island, while in further inspection, the novel is a story based on Golding’s views on human nature. Without contextual analysis, Lord of the Flies is simply about the English boys who crash on the island during evacuation from war and realize that there are no adults to manage them. Their immediate societal instinct is to form a government and order, but after being stranded for too long, the societal influences wither away until the boys become savages, separating into tribes that fight amongst themselves. The island represents a place without social restraints where the characters are fully able to delve into their state of nature. They are without friends, family, religion, and a structured law and justice system; all they have is language that allows them to manifest themselves into a state of nature. The novel portrays an experiment with an independent linguistic variable that subjects the boys to evolve. The experiment may be slightly skewed due to the fact that the boys once existed in a structured society, although, it provides insight that no matter how manicured a society is, it will always revert to the state of nature when given the chance. Lord of the Flies is truly not about the adventures of boys, but their actions that mimic the larger world where war has dominated civilization. Objects like the conch, Piggy’s glasses, the fire, and the beast each represents a defining character of mankind. In the Lord of the Flies, the conch, glasses, fire, and beast symbolically represent elements of the real world; characters represent different parts of existing humanity and recurring...

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...with them to hopefully appear to have some authority. Roger, a major culprit of savagery, leans on a large bolder. Golding wrote, “The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; and the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist… ‘See? See? That’s what you’ll get! I meant that! There isn’t a tribe for you anymore! The conch is gone--’ He ran forward, stooping. ‘I’m chief!’” (181). Piggy was always loyal to the defined power of the conch, and so the end of civilization resulted in the death of reason and the death of authority. It is symbolic of a government in absence. A nation without any form of social control, according to Golding, inevitably produces rampant savagery and a loss of rationality. The conch was crucial to the survival of the islands humanity, and likewise, social control is crucial to the survival of a civil mankind.

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