The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a political satire on society.

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The Island

The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a political satire on society. The butt of the satire is “civilization” at the time of the second world war. During this era, a civilized society goes to war and obliterates, maims, and kills. In this novel, Golding depicts destruction, killing, and fear as evil in the heart of man, and uses irony to elaborate on this theme.

The novel begins with a plane crashing on an uninhabited island. We are not told the reason for this, but we can assume the crash was a result of events associated with World War II. The survivors of the crash are a group of boys who we know little about prior to the crash. The group of boys then attempt to create a functional society by using a system of rules and a chief. The story then revolves around the breakdown of the boys" society.

Piggy and Ralph meet up with each other after escaping from their shot-down plane. A large scar was made by the crashing plane in the untouched jungle, symbolizing the first of man's destruction on the island. A war is going on in the outside world, and now for the rest of the book, everyone on the island will be isolated from the real world and put into their own "world." Throughout the book we are told of the scar, and it is clear to understand that the scar symbolises man's destruction and destructive forces

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The island is ultimately a natural environment "untamed by man" that holds the resources for the boys’ survival parallel to other life on the island. Golding tries to convey the island like a cage confining the boys and isolating them from the rest of the world. We are told in the story that "no boy could reach even the reef over the stretch of water." This shows us that the reef is like a boundary that cannot be crossed by any inhabitant on the island. A major factor stopping the boys getting even close to the reef is between the ...

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