The Lord of the Flies - In the closing scene, what does the officer’s evaluation of the boy’s experience on the island suggest about the adult world?

In the closing scene, what does the officer’s evaluation of the boy’s experience on the island suggest about the adult world?

Golding’s novel, “The Lord of the Flies”, shows the way children act and think in a way that has never been seen in another novel. It shows the reality of how children would truly behave if they were stranded on a deserted island. In many novels kids are portrayed as being innocent and benign, because that is what most adults think of kids. This is a mistake made by adults because kids are not so innocent and harmless as they believe. This ignorance displayed by the adults can be evidently seen at the end of the novel.

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At the end of the novel when Ralph was escaping from Jack and his hunter, and the raging fire, he falls at the feet of a soldier. The first thing the soldier asks if there were any adults on the island. This shows that the soldier prefers to talk to an adult than to talk with Ralph because he believes he is a kid and he couldn’t explain what happened. The adult world belief that the kids are innocent and that without any adults to guide them they are not capable of doing anything. The soldier sees all the boys with painted faces shouting and running and he believes that they were playing a game, when actually they were killing each other like savages. The soldier asks Ralph sarcastically, “What have you been doing? Having a war or something”, “Nobody killed, I hope? Any dead bodies?”, he asks this as a joke but the answer was nothing to laugh about. The soldier is shocked by the answer Ralph gives him, leaving him perplexed by the answer. The soldier thought that all the time they were in the island they were playing and having fun when actually the things the kids lived in there, all of the good and the bad ones, will mark them for the rest of their lives.

The adult world underestimates the children’s potential of doing good and of doing evil. They think that children are no good without an adult to direct them into the right path. The adult world think of the kids as big babies when actually they are small adults. The soldier would have never thought that 2 children were assassinated by other children because he thought that they would behave the same they would with adults around. All this ignorance shows that the adults should take more time and talk to children to really see what they think and to realize what they are capable of.

What Golding is trying to convey is that children are just like every other adult, and that they are not pure innocence and happiness; they also have feelings like greed, hate, ambition and that they can be evil as well. The adult world would have never guessed that the kids would become savages and that they would start to kill each other. They expected the kids to behave like they are supposed to. As stated before and as proven by the conversation Ralph had with the soldier, kids are underestimated and they are believed to be very innocent and ignorant by the adult world, but in fact they are capable of doing things unimaginable to adults. The evaluation the officer made of the boys’ experience in the island shows how little adults know about reality of kids and how confident they are that kids are not capable of perpetrating evil things such as murdering.

Pedro Ferrer

10/17/02

English 10th Grade