What is Golding Telling us About Society in 'Lord of the Flies'

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Mann Nair                11Y2

Ms Alexander                1729

What Is William Golding Telling Us About Civilisation in ‘Lord Of The Flies’?

What William Golding is telling us about civilisation is that without rules and organisation, civilisation would not be able to exist and that there is a beast in everyone, it is just a question of whether it can be controlled. His point is shown through the actions of boys on the island, through their transformation from being normal school boys to a murderous mob of savages. At the start of the novel, a group of schoolboys have crash-landed on a deserted island. Golding has experimented with boys to see how they would react without adults. He has placed them on an uninhabited island with food and water. After they have crash-landed, two characters emerge- Ralph and Piggy. Ralph is excited by the idea that there are no adults on the island so he can have fun;

‘In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy. “No grown-ups!”

Conversely, Piggy is worried that there are no grown ups on the island. Piggy finds the conch and gives it to Ralph and tells him to blow on it. After Ralph has blown on it, all the other boys follow the sound of the conch and gather around Ralph and a democratic election takes place where Jack and Ralph were the candidates. Ralph gets elected, as Ralph was the one who blew the conch. During the election the reader is introduced to Jack. Jack is a character who loves to be in command and control of anything. Ralph’s main objective after the election is to make a fire and try to keep it alights until someone spots it to save them. He creates rules to ensure that order is kept on the island. By creating these rules, Ralph has formed a new civilisation within the island for the boys. Therefore creating a civilisation or even a hierarchical structure in the island depicting the different motives and missions of each role in civilisation and who wins and who loses. Without the rules that Ralph has made, the boys would be in anarchy and become savages from the beginning. This book is also an attempt to trace the faults of civilisation back to the defects of human nature.

During the novel, a beast haunts the boy’s dreams. It begins when a ‘littlun’, misinterprets a snake for a beast. No one believed the ‘littlun’ at first, but as the story progressed they started to fear the beast. They had themselves to blame for this beast, as it was they that were conjuring up the fear of the so-called beast. This beast is further misinterpreted as a dead parachutist. The beast is within the boys. This causes the fear that instigates a lot of the boys’ actions. But Jack manipulates the boy’s feelings and tells them that if there were a beast, then he would hunt it down. By saying this the boys felt protected and hence started to prefer to fight against the unknown beast rather than believe if there was or wasn’t a 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-!”’

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This shows that Jack had taken the first step into becoming a savage. By saying “Bollocks to the rules”, he has said that he has no regards to the rules. He manipulated the others’ minds so he could be elected chief; gaining trust by saying he is guarding them from the beast. However, there isn’t a beast on the island hence they cannot hunt it down, this is what Simon discovers further on. Simon had a hallucination in where he meets head-on with a pig’s head on a stick covered with flies, in front of a derelict cave. The ...

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