William Golding's Lord of the Flies

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The Schoolboys Versus The Island
When your life is on the line and you are threatened, some of you human instincts will take over. In the next couple paragraphs you will see how the boys on the island express their survival skills against nature, deal with their surroundings and how it reflects their character, and how they evolve and adapt to their isolated world. But maybe most of all just being a little lucky and being the most fit for the environment. When it comes down to it, you will do whatever necessary to survive.
When you are in the wild, you do whatever you can to survive. It is all about survival of the fittest. Especially if there are no rules like in the book. This shows a lot between Jack and Ralph. It seems pretty obvious that Jack is more fit to survive in the natural environment. He adapts to hunting and killing to survive. He says about hunting "We could steal up on one - paint our faces so they wouldn't see - perhaps surround them and then -" (Golding 54). Jack explains his plan to hunt for meat to Ralph. The need for meat to survive was important to Jack. On the other hand Ralph says "They might have seen us. We might have gone home -" (Golding 70). Ralph is angry Jack let the fire go out when a ship went past. With the smoke, the ship may have seen them and taken them off the island. This shows Jack's survival skill, needing to eat, against Ralph's want to get back home, out of the wild. Rogar is also very fit for a natural world. He cares about himself and what is good for him. Like during the confrontation when it says “High overhead, Roger, with a sense of delirious abandonment, leaned all his weight on the lever” (Golding 180). Roger does this to release the boulder towards Ralph, Piggy and Samneric. ...

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...ed island, whether the right way or not. The boys became adapted to their environment; they lived with the resources that they could find on the island. I believe as the book went on each individual kind of went their own way, due to nature and their own nature. "Man vs. nature" is our theme; and although these boys did get off of the island, not all of them did! With that said, nature won, because man, or the boys, was not able to keep themselves together and keep their old, civil life. Life will throw you all types of obstacles, and you just have to be able to stay on the same track whether that means finding a new track or building your own. Never let someone or something make you do something you do not want to do, like Jack did. Be yourself and stick up for what you believe in!

Works Cited

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

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