preview

Lord Of The Flies Character Analysis

Good Essays

Evil, the act inflicting pain on others, and the desire to always want to hurt someone physically or emotionally. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the boys are placed in strenuous circumstances that cause them to perform ruthless acts on each other. In Dr.Zimbardo’s Ted Talk he claims that when an individual is placed under the proper circumstances, he or she is competent of pursuing malevolent behavior towards someone. It is clearly demonstrated in the novel when the boys show dispositional factors (bad apples vs good apples), situational factor (bad barrels), and systemic factors (bad barrel makers). There are multiple instances within the novel where dispositional factors lead to the act of evil. Roger is a bad apple, described as a cruel character who bullies littluns for his own personal amusement. It is believed that in the beginning of the book he was less savage as he still had a civilized part of him. However, as the story developed his evil character begins to show in full fruition when he kills Piggy. “Roger with a sense of delirious abandonment leaned all his weight on the lever… Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square, red rock in the sea.” (Golding 201) In this quote, the death of Piggy is fully described. Not only does he die, but we also find out that Roger is responsible for Piggy’s cold-blooded assassination. This quote reveals that he is a bad apple because it exhibits his violent savage behavior and shows that these

Get Access