Explanation In Lord Of The Flies By William Golding

Throughout history and literature, symbols have been used to represent the bigger picture or main ideas. This allows the reader to illustrate the symbol in their head and have a much better overall understanding of the book. A number of times during Golding’s Lord of the Flies, he uses symbols to illustrate the boys’ destruction and fall from order into savagery. The regression of the boys’ civilization is evident through Golding’s symbolic use of the conch shell, the signal fire and the beastie. All are critical for expressing Golding’s overall message.

Throughout the novel of Lord of the Flies, William Golding provides a profound insight into human nature. Golding builds on a message that all human beings have natural evil inside them. To emphasize, the innate evil is revealed when there’s lack of civilization. The boys are constantly faced with numerous fears and eventually break up into two different groups. Although the boys believe the beast lives in the jungle, Golding makes it clear that it lurks in their hearts. The message of inner evil is portrayed throughout the book by the destruction of the conch, terrifying beast, and character developments to establish the hidden message throughout the novel.

Name: Adrian Galvan___________________________ Text: lord of the flies_____________________________ Chapter(s): 9-12________________________ Pages: _145-208___________________________ Page # Important Ideas and Information in the Text My Thoughts, Feelings, Questions Page 148 Page 149 Page150 Page 152 Page 153 Page156 Page 156 Page 161 Page 175 Page 176 Page 179 Page 184 Page 189 Page 200 “Perhaps we ought to go to….I mean to make sure nothing happens.” “take them some meat” “ And the conch doesn’t count at this end of the island.” “Kill the beast!

This quote explains how Jack is not willing to follow the rules of the civilization that they have created. In order to create this fire on the other hand, Jack needs to steal Piggy’s glasses which will cause a lot of chaos and destruction. Even though he could have politely asked for

The character, Simon was like a stronghold for the boys, he was the one who discovers that the beast, rather than a physical object, was themselves, “maybe it’s only us” (…). However, this was not what the boys wanted to hear. Like Jesus, Simon who wanted to save the boys and tried on multiple occasions, was killed for trying to save mankind, or in this case all the boys on the island. Upon his death, Golding depicts Simon death as,

Simon later encounters the Lord of the Flies (a pig’s head on a stick that Jack left as a sacrifice for the beast) who “speaks” to Simon while he is having a brain clot. The Lord of the Flies tells Simon that it is the beast, that it’s inside of everyone. “Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill!” (Page 143) it tells him, reminding Simon that to defeat the “beast”, or evil, within a person is impossible to physically accomplish. It’s as if everyone has a ticking time bomb of malevolence that is kept in check by our moral values and societal standards.

In the book Jack is always making fun of Piggy. Jack was being rude to Piggy and saying his fat behind doesn’t do nothing to help while piggy was trying to talk. However some of the time Piggy stands up for himself, “I got the conch … you let me speak!”(Golding 33). Piggy illustrates how its not easy to have integrity. This is because whenever he tries to talk the others mainly Jack just tell him to shut up or take his glasses from him making him feel uncomfortable.

Once they kill Simon it explains deeply about how they kill him and how cruel and brutal it was. They kill him by biting and clawing and acting like savages. Simon says that it's themselves that is the beast and it shows in the part of the story how they act savage and

Piggy is fat, brilliant, lacking in social graces, and wears glasses, in other words the outsider on this island. Due to Piggy being such an foreigner, Jack feels that he is above Piggy, and feels better when he causes Piggy pain and sorrow. For example, “‘You’re talking too much,’ said Jack Merridew. ‘Shut up Fatty,’” (21). In this scene you can see power in Piggy’s lack thereof.

When Piggy was trying to reason with Jack to give him back his glasses, Roger lets loose a boulder that “struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee […] Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went […] Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea” (163). Piggy’s death was ironically cruel and barbaric during what was supposed to be a civilized, orderly plead to Jack showing that the innate evil of human nature will always overcome any attempts to remain civilized. Sadly, Jack tries to justify this and make a scapegoat out of Piggy by wildly screaming, “‘See? See? That’s what you’ll get!

The ineffective crucifixion and attempt at martyrdom are evidence of his great failure. Simon's act of cutting the parachutist free leads to the corpse resembling the beast in flight. The body then travels deep into the ocean while simultaneously driving the idea of the “beast” deeper into the mind of the boys. Simon also brings out the most primitive side of the boys while they commit murder for the first time. The boys will kill a human on the island again, and will continue to show how Simon was unsuccessful at being a Christ figure on the

This shows that the boys are only afraid of themselves, because they are their own worst enemy. He is the first to figure out that the beast is not an actual beast, and how it is only the boys becoming savage, and starting to be afraid of one another. As Simon began to explain this to the doubtful boys, he was the only one who died knowing the

From the book, it can be inferred that the boys in Jack’s tribe, including himself, had all agreed, or forced to agree, to kill Piggy. Jack didn’t think of the conch as anything special with meaning anymore. When the conch was smashed into pieces, so was any little hope of civilization. Jack had finally gotten the power that he desperately desired by getting rid of the conch. Despite the fact that Jack didn’t want the conch around anymore, it was still an important factor that helped him reach to the top and eventually rule all of the boys, with or without their

In Document E, Simon finds an airman that had crash landed and was “rotting and fly-blown”. Simon then has an epiphany. What if the beast isn’t fear or war, but something a little more complicated. Maybe the beast is savagery of humans. Savagery meaning an uncivilized or inhuman state or condition.

The collective fear of the unknown leads to the untimely and accidental death of Simon. The distress present in the boys causes their impulsive action, of Simon’s horrific murder. Fear of “the beast” an imaginary creature causes the boys to act irrational, and provokes survival instincts as a result of life threatening terror. The fear of the boys in this moment is epitomized when they chant, “Kill the beast!, Cut his throat, Spill his blood!” (168).