Brutal Savagery

With an understanding of the inherent darkness in all men and first-hand experience with savagery and violence in World War II, William Golding used Lord of the Flies as not only a historical allegory and a pulpit from which to address the darkness in all men, but also as a metaphor and a example that no one is exempt from human nature. Golding’s characters in Lord of the Flies reflect this idea greatly, but none more so than Roger. Throughout Lord of the Flies, Golding uses the character of Roger to show the follies of mankind and the ability of all people to turn to savagery, as well as the inherent nature of man and society’s internalized acceptance of violence, stemming from Golding’s own experiences with the subject. Golding created

This quote conveys how the characters in the novel have desire to kill the beast so that they can survive. Moreover, the evil within certain characters like Jack and his tribe make them impatient which lead them to mistakenly think Simon as a beast in the night and murder him. It also shows how the boys are turning to behave like animals or savages in order to escape and save themselves from the beast. Basically, human nature is naturally evil due to the competition for survival.

The boys don’t put into practice their teachings from church/school on the island, but become savage beasts. This shows us that man is civilized in our society, only because of the fear for higher authority, not because that’s their nature.

Later, Jack and his hunters display another example of human evil with the gruesome slaughtering of a pig. They don’t just stab it to death and get it over with, but carry on deranged acts like taking a stick sharpened at both ends, with one side in the ground and the other for the pig to be impaled on. They take joy in the blood of the pig and show odd sexual hunger when they sodomize the pig with a stick.

(Golding 33). Being stranded on the island has majorly changed Jack, he is praised for killing pigs because of it supply of meat. The amount of praise and the feeling of victory after a kill has caused Jack to go mad. The society within the island has corrupted Jack and many of his hunters because they are praised so greatly for killing a pig that they have now adapted this hunting as an evil game, the hunts are no longer for food but instead for self pride, and praise, and power.

In our society, people are often cruel to one another in the want for personal gain, but this is restrained to mere social interactions and online in our industrial world. However, when we are separated from civilized society and the pressures that it places upon us, we are quick to turn to savage, cruel behavior to survive. Golding understood this idea, that we are only civilized when others are watching, and showed the possibility for even the purest to become affected by societal pressures in his novel, the Lord of the Flies. In order to show the role of cruelty in shaping the novel Lord of the Flies, Golding uses character archetypes, the idea of cosmic irony, and extended symbolism to highlight the inherent flaws of human nature and the potential for even the purest individuals to turn to cruel ways due to societal pressures.

After World War II countries were in shambles, overran with fear that was fueled by the abundance of hate and violence that stemmed from Germany. The plentiful amounts of evil William Golding was witnessing drove him to write Lord of the Flies. Form this, we can conclude that aspects of his story are an allegory to what Golding observed throughout the war. In his story, William Golding expresses the importance of a civilization’s nature to be ethically correct and explains that without the precise guidance, the natural savageness of humans can prevent society from thriving. Golding’s statement is correct because without society’s moral compass humans would revert to their savage nature, pray on the weak, and would be driven toward aggression.

Children are, by nature, malevolent. They possess an ingrained cruelty that was not taught to them, because they require no instruction. This truth is present throughout the entirety of the novel but is especially demonstrated by the boy's treatment of “Piggy”. Even Ralph, the alleged “good” child takes pleasure from this cruelty, shown when Piggy says to him,“ ‘I don’t care what they call me,’ he said confidently, ‘so long as they don’t call me what they used to call me at school.’ … ‘They used to call me “Piggy”.’ Ralph shrieked with laughter.” (Page 6).

    Despite the progression of civilization and society's attempts to suppress man's darker side, moral depravity proves both indestructible and inescapable; contrary to culturally embraced views of humanistic tendencies towards goodness, each individual is susceptible to his base, innate instincts. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, seemingly innocent schoolboys evolve into bloodthirsty savages as the latent evil within them emerges. Their regression into savagery is ironically paralleled by an intensifying fear of evil, and it culminates in several brutal slays as well as a frenzied manhunt. The graphic consequence of the boys' unrestrained barbarity, emphasized by the

(168) The boys' crude actions put a stop to Simon’s judgment before he could even get it out of his mouth because of the boys' paranoia, painting Simon as the imaginary beast. Overall, the beast,

Holden Caulfield: Holden is a 16 year-old boy who moves from school to school after being expelled from each school. Throughout the story, he mourns over the death of his brother Allie. Holden has a basic teenager personality. He is sarcastic and very judgmental. He calls people “phony” because they try to pretend to be someone they are not.

Savagery Is Inside Us All The central theme of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is that savagery is in us all. SO, in this essay, 3 characterized will be analyzed to help prove Golding’s point. The three characters will be Roger, Jack and Ralph. As seen in the book, Roger was a savage before he got on the island, Jack’s savagery came out at a moderate pace as things started picking up, and Ralph was only a savage once the savagery of the other boys was being used against him.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a novel in which the themes of violence and savagery are explored. The novel is about a group of British boys stranded on an isolated island at the time of World War II. On the island, there is conflict between two main characters, Jack and Ralph, who represent civilisation and savagery. This has an effect on the rest of the boys throughout the novel as they dig further and further into savagery. I believe that the novel shows us that humans are basically violent and savage, and that though there is instances of civilization ultimately savagery prevails amongst human beings.

The boys project their irrational fears as a derivative of their immaturity, in an attempt to identify a realized external enemy. Literary critic Lawrence S. Friedman explains, “Too immature to account for the enemy within, the boys project their irrational fears onto the outside world. The first of these projections takes the shape of a snakelike “beastie,” the product of a small boy’s nightmare.” (233) The boys’ irrational fear of the unknown, one of a small boy’s nightmare, only serves to exemplify their immaturity in handling situations like this. It is a stepping stone to events to come, prophesied by Simon. In addition, the character of Simon alludes to the fact that there evil ‘beast’ can really be traced to their internalized innate evilness. Simon argues, “maybe there is a beast… What I mean is… maybe it’s only us.” (Golding 89) While all of the boys attempt to explain the phenomena of the ‘beast,’ Simon is the one who realizes that the boys themselves are the evil ‘beast’ they perceive. There is no external force, the ‘beast’ only serves to be a placeholder for the boys’ true primal nature. However, it is Simon’s death, at the hand of the boys themselves, that only serves to prove that evil truly exists in all of these boys. Friedman suggests, “The ritual murder of Simon is as ironic as it is inevitable. Ironically, he is killed as the beast before he can explain that the beast does not exist. His horrid death refutes is aborted revelation: the beast exists, all right, not where we thought to find it, but within ourselves.” (236) His death is truly the tipping point, a point of no return for the boys. After his killing, Simon’s philosophy of inner evil is realized. It is clear that his own philosophy is what ultimately leads to Simon’s death, as unfortunate as it may be. It is reflected of the group’s fear of the unknown, and their

This teaches the other kids that in killing and hunting are just fun games. “[Ralph], they are going to hunt you tomorrow,” says one of the twins, and he tells Ralph, “Roger is sharpening a stick at both ends” (Golding 190). This final stage begins at the point where Jack plans on hunting Ralph. This hunt shows the full evolution of the kids into barbaric boys. The opaque idea of how kids could want to kill their own kind holds much gravity in it, something that their savagery obscures to the kids. Without even telling the details, Golding shows that throughout the whole book the unknown savagery from inside these kids is truly evolving in to the nightmare world. The fact that Roger even sharpens a stick at both ends shows Roger thinking that killing Ralph as a game because of the savagery obscuring the kids. Many of the kids are blinded by savagery as they hunt for Ralph. Through the barbaric actions of Robert getting hurt by his friends, the ferocity shown as they murdered of the sow, and finally the hunt for Ralph, Golding shows that savagery exists in all people.