Fear In Lord Of The Flies Theme Essay

Fear is more than just Imagination H.P. Lovecraft once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (“Fear”). Fear is a major theme in Lord of the Flies. In the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, a group of British schoolboys are on an island due to their plane getting shot down. There are no adults with these boys, so they have to figure out a way to live and work together cooperatively. At the beginning of the novel things are going well, and the boys appoint a leader and assign different jobs to groups of people. However, as the story develops, things take a turn for the worst. Since the boys are not familiar with the island, it makes them imagine things that create fear inside of them. This fear makes them

For example, everyone is in the middle of doing their reenactment of killing the pig when all of a sudden the littluns notice something coming out of the forest. The littluns then shout at the biguns. “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!’ The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest” (Golding 136). It was a dark, stormy night, which made it scary for the boys, and also difficult to see. Then when the boys see the dark figure coming out of the forest, they automatically assume it is the beast. The dark figure turns out to be Simon. The boy’s intense fear of the beast clouds their judgement and makes them beat Simon to death immediately without any hesitation. The boys thought they were attacking the beast that they have been fearing this whole time. This situation shows how fear can take over someone and make them act how they normally would not, because these boys do not hate Simon or want to kill him but their fear ends up making them kill