Motifs In Lord Of The Flies

The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding may seem simple but has much deeper meaning when you look at the over arching theme. When a group of british boys are stranded on a tropical island they soon start to work together to survive but soon start to forget what they had learned in a civilized environment.There are many meanings and motifs in the novel that elude to even more complex thought about the story and they include civilization, weather, and the games they play have a more complex meaning. This novel is based around the battle between civilization and savagery, there are motifs for both but civilization is shown quite often. Such as the conch which gathered the boys when they first got to the island, when you wanted to speak you had to hold the conch shell and when was blown the kids would conduct meetings. Towards the end of the novel the conch is destroyed and that is when all civilization has been destroyed and the boys are left with

Early in the novel a kid named Roger is destroying other people's sandcastles and throwing rocks to miss at other kids, this shows how he could hit the other kids but civilization is stopping him from hurting the kid. It then escalates to lighting a signal fire so they can be rescued but then turns into a huge blaze that burns down the forests on half the island. The kids don't take it as a serious danger they take it as a game and pay no mind to it. The boys begin hunting which of course they think is a tag game but with killing animals for food and this escalates to them pretending to hunt another boy and soon turns almost violent but they stop themselves. To the peak game of all they are dancing, chanting in a circle and when a boy runs into the middle they close in scratching,clawing, biting killing the boy and of course all the kids can remember is that it was just a