Lord of the Flies

This narrative shows the humanity’s dark side, the savagery that exists even in the contemporary beings. Golding seeks to indicate a tragic caricature of kids, adventure narratives. He presents us with a series of events directing a collection of boys from adventure to disaster as they attempt to endure their uncivilized, free isolated setting.

During a nuclear battle, a collection of British boys ends up stranded in a tropical island devoid of adult control. The boys are between ages six and twelve. At the beginning, the boys attempt to create a culture equal to the one at their homes by electing a leader: Ralph, who is to be assisted by Piggy to structure housing and sanitation rules. Ralph seeks to make a fire to attract any attention of rescuers like a passing by ship. Jack controls a cluster of hunter boys’ sacrifice to maintain the fire in order to engage in secret hunts. Jack is the greatest obstacle to Ralph’s leadership, he even pulls some boys away from Ralph’s command. The boys joined Jack owing to their innate inclination towards dangerous hunting actions representing violence and evil (Golding, 2002).

The disagreement amongst Ralph and Jack along with savagery and civilization forces they symbolize is shown by their literal terror of a mythological beast circling the island. Afterwards an aerial warfare occurs on the island airspace. One combat casualty is seen floating on the ground bearing an open parachute. The parachute is occasionally gets inflated by the winds, this makes the body appear to be sitting up. These instances frighten the boys since they think the body is the beast they have feared. To react to this Jack creates a fragment group involving almost all the boys. These boys are attracted by Jack’s fierceness since it seems to offer protection in addition to playing the savages role: wearing the camouflage facial paint, hunting and undertaking ritualistic ancestral dances (Golding, 2002).  Ultimately, Jack’s group killed a sow as a sacrifice to the beast by placing the sow’s head on a stick

Only mystic Simon bears the courage to identify the beast’s real identity on the mountain, subsequent to seeing the demise of the sow together with awarding its head to the beast, Simon starts to hallucinate. The head that was staked turns out to be the Lord of the Flies as Simon had at all times thought: the beast animal is unreal but rather exists in their minds, this makes Simon lose his consciousness. Simon when trying to take the news that the ‘beast’ is a human being is later killed by Jack’s group.  After some disagreement, Jack’s group also kills Piggy and they also light up fire to catch Ralph who is rescued by a naval officer (Golding, 2002).

The theme of civilization versus savagery that Ralph and Jack represent respectively is evidenced by the fact that when Ralph seeks to maintain order, moral and ethical rules, Jack is interested in controlling the boys through illicit power and exploitation. Additionally Jack fails to recognize the elections as legitimate (Golding, 2002). An additional theme is that of individualism versus community: Jack seeks to have fun and please his individual self whilst Ralph seeks to secure the community through cooperation. The boys also indicate self-interests once they decide to join Jack’s group leaving Ralph. The theme of evil is evident in the narrative: the boys fear a beast, which is similar to Satan in the Christian setting. The irrational fear leads to fatal encounters between Ralph and Jack resulting to deaths of Piggy and Simon.

References

Golding, W. (2002). Lord of the flies. New York: Listening Library.