A Tainted Scrutiny of Society
Loss of innocence results naturally from one’s increasing contact with the innate evil and savagery within themselves. Without a civilized society’s guiding hand, an individual’s instinctive evil and savagery take over their sense of order. In his novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding uses characters and symbols to demonstrate that the breakdown of civilization leads to inhumanity and savagery, thus showing that chaos thrives in the absence of order.
Hunting can provide meat and satisfy hunger, but on the contrary, it can also kill and take away one’s life wrongfully. At the beginning of the novel, Golding shows how Jack and his hunters hunt to provide meat for everyone and to satisfy Jack’s thirst to hunt. “‘We crept up–.’ ‘The pig squealed–.’… Ralph spoke. ‘You let the fire out.’ Jack checked, vaguely irritated by this irrelevance but too happy to let it worry him.’ ‘We can light the fire again. You should have been with us. Ralph. We had a smashing time.’”(73). In satisfying hunger, the hunters ignore society’s more important tasks such as sustaining the fire. This is significant because from the very first hunt, we can contemplate the emergence of future conflicts. For example, a silent challenge between Jack and Ralph begins from this point. Amid them, hunting becomes a controversial subject. This is because they cannot be engrossed in the fire and hunting at the same time. However, hunting offered short term results that were appreciated by all the boys on the island while the fire offered barely any results. Already, we can see the negative impacts hunting brings to this society and the way it can eventually break up a civilized society by causing conflicts among its members. Later on, for the boys on the island, hunting no longer remains a means by which to find food, but instead, it becomes a means by which to find and kill the beast. “‘Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong – we hunt! If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat –!’” (99). For many of the boys, hunting seems to be the only solution to end the beast talk. However, Piggy is the only one who does not think so and thus he finds an alternate way of being safe from the beast – by remaining in their part of the island. At this point in the novel, one can see that the majority of the boys no longer care for humane and non-savage ways of resolving their problems but instead, they look to hunting as the only possible solution. Their circumstances, those without any form of civilization and order, force them to become savage. Since the boys have already excelled at the task of hunting and killing a pig, they no longer feel it that is difficult to do the same to any other form of life, thus showing that they do not deplore the forces of atrocity. Their task of hunting detains them so that they are not even able to pay attention to the more important tasks of survival. Near the end of the novel, Golding shows how hunting is used to find Ralph for the obvious purpose of killing him. “‘They hate you, Ralph. They’re going to do you.’ ‘They’re going to hunt you to-morrow.’…‘–and we’ve got to be careful and throw our spears like at a pig.’” (209). Hunting was once used as something by which to find food and to satisfy hunger, and now it is being used as something that has just one obvious purpose –to kill. By the end of the novel, hunting has disintegrated simply into an aspiration to kill. The way that Ralph will be hunted, like a pig, enumerates the level of inhumanity to which the boys have been reduced to. At this point in the novel, there no longer remains a civilized society, and therefore hunting for Ralph illustrates that inhumanity and chaos increase in the absence of order & civilization. The emblematic implication of hunting is used in this novel, to demonstrate how savagery and sadistically determined behaviour can take over one’s senses when no fetters of society are within reach to discourage it.
