Lord Of The Flies Biblical Allusions Analysis

”Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Now out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind. Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Again the blue-white scar jagged above them and the sulphurous explosion beat down. The littluns screamed and blundered about, fleeing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror. Him! Him!” (Golding 152) William Golding’s allegorical parable novella, Lord of the Flies, takes place amidst a fictional World War Three. The story begins as group of british choir boys are fleeing England due to the threat of a possible catastrophic nuclear attack. But when every adult on-board is killed by an ensuing plane crash, given the boys current predicament,

These biblical allusions help convey the parables message. One example from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is the use of the Garden of Eden as the environment for which the novella takes place in. Set apart the boys from their now inhabited island and what is left is a paradise. If not for the internal social conflicts, the boys could realistically survive on this island, for their is an adequate amount of food for all the boys to eat. Coinciding to Adam and Eve’s story, a second example of a biblical allusion is a representation the serpent from the biblical tale. Within the text the boy’s refer to the Beastie as a snake-like creature. “Tell us about the snake-thing. Now he says it is a beastie”(Golding 35), the littluns insisted. A sacrificial pig head on a stick is referred to as the Lord of the Flies within Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Flies is an allusion to the devil. This is proven through its translation through the hebrew language to spell Beelzebub or Satan given its english translation. The Lord of the Flies would emerge to morality and converse with a boy by the name of Simon, but whether the incident is imagined by Simon or rather enacted through reality is unclear to the reader. “You are a silly little boy.” said the Lord of the Flies to Simon, “Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill!”(Golding 143) Through

Within more serious novels, irony acts as a way of comic relief and or irony can serve poetic justice to the respective antagonist of said novel, Poetic justice is sentenced to Jack through an occurrence of situational irony at the end of Lord of the Flies. In the ending sequence of Lord of the Flies the main protagonist, Ralph, is trying to escape from an island wide manhunt by Jack’s tribe. Jack’s sole intention for the manhunt is to claim Ralph 's head and thus his order would be marked as the most heinous to date. With pursuing tribes men close behind and a raging inferno even behind them, Ralph is cornered as he emerged on to the sand of a beach. When the reader is certain Ralph will be caught an act of deus ex machina presents itself when a naval officer is standing directly in front of Ralph. Unbenounced to the boys, their accidentally caused raging wildfire has ironically signaled a british naval vessel to come ashore and investigate. This is an example of both dramatic and situational irony due to two factors. One factor being that throughout the book Jack and his people were largely opposed to the prospect of rescued by way signaling ships through a fire. In addition, being that the boys rescue is due in part to Jack’s creation of an accidental signal fire contradicts his very nature; thus creating situational irony. As for the