William Golding´s Lord of the Flies: A Look at the Evil of Man through the Christian Lens

Woe Soyinka, a Nigerian writer, once said “Well, some people say I'm pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?” Essentially, Soyinka is saying that it is mankind’s inevitable fate to repeat its past due to the endless existence of evil. Soyinka’s ideas are echoed in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In the novel, a group of well-behaved British boys are stranded on an island. In time, the boys’ natural savage instincts are revealed. Throughout the novel, the reader should see that Golding uses Christian imagery to reinforce the idea that mankind is naturally evil and is doomed to repeat its past.

The reader should see that Golding uses diction to portray the island as a living hell. In the beginning of the novel when the boys crash onto the island, Piggy voices his worries that the boys might be stuck on the island until they die. Right with that word, the heat on the island seemed to increase until “it became a threatening weight” (14). Golding did not have to mention this at all, but he purposefully chose to write that the island seemed to get hotter right when Piggy said that the boys might die on this island. Not only did the island get hotter, but the heat was “threatening”. The reader should see that with these words, Golding is portraying the island as hell. In Christianity, hell is the place where sinners go when they die; a place where the heat is unbearable and endless. For Piggy to mention death, and for the heat on the island to increase at the same time he said it, hell should be on the reader’s mind. Not only is the island hot, but several times throughout the novel Golding emphasizes Jack’s appearance, esp...

... middle of paper ...

... Eve, the first humans, committed. This idea, as well as other Christian ideas, reflects many of Golding’s arguments.

We now can see that Golding wanted us to understand that humans are naturally evil and are simply going to repeat their past mistakes. He reinforces this idea through the use of a hell motif and Christ figure imagery. Golding makes this argument so that we can understand who we are as people. Ever since the beginning of time, man has been making mistakes. The natural evil inside all of us takes control and bad things happen. From the enslavement of the Israelites in ancient Egypt, to the enslavement of African Americans in the 1800s in America, people have been doing bad things for a long time and will continue to do bad things. Soyinka would agree with the fact that humans are doomed to repeat their past; that is just the natural order of things.