William Golding Lord Of The Flies Symbolic Analysis

William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is symbolized throughout the whole story. The symbols are always changing throughout the novel. This gives a perspective of the society. All the symbols together have a historic event and lesson Golding is telling. Everyone and every object have a symbolic meaning behind them. William Golding, throughout the novel, creates many symbols to give his view of the world to other people reading his book.

The conch shell is mentioned at the beginning and throughout the whole book. The symbolism behind the conch shell is the rule of law and civilization. In the novel, the boys use it to govern the meetings by whoever is holding the conch shell has the right to speak. The conch shell is not just a symbol, but also democratic power, which later in the novel it loses its power. Eventually, the boulder that crushed Piggy also crushes the conch shell signifying the loss of civilized instinct in almost all of the boys on the island.

Fire symbolizes the measurement of strength of civilized instinct left. At the beginning of the novel the boys create fire in hope to be rescued which is connected to civilization and that the boys want to be rescued. When the fire dies down, the boys have lost hope of being rescued and are beginning to accept their savage life on the island. Also, the fire could symbolize technology and can be dangerous if it gets out of control. The fire got out of control and killed several young boys in the novel.

After being rejected twenty-one times, William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies was published in 1954. Golding had a certain perception of humanity and made a symbolic novel. The way Golding described his theme was, "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.". William Golding made this novel to get a point across to everyone and it is our job to break it down and understand what the novel is really