Lord Of The Flies Free

“In ‘Lord of the flies’ Golding is clearly seeking to explore fundamental human nature and this is apparent from the way in which he portrays the slackening hold of civilisation on the boys can the consequent atavistic regression. By reversing mankind’s evolution, he strips the boys to their essential nature. ” Referring to three episodes in the novel, analyse the boys regression into savagery and explore what Golding reveals about mankind’s essential nature. ‘Lord of the Flies’ was written by a man called William Golding and was first published in 1954 and shocked the nation, as the thought of the boys killing each other shocked the nation.

The basic storyline is about boys ranging from four to twelve, their plane crashes and they are stranded on an island where they slowly descend to savagery. The story mainly focuses on the elder boys, the main characters are Ralph, Piggy and Jack. The boys live in a world that is in a nuclear war. Golding was affected by the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and this book showed that everyone had this evil and he stressed this point by making the character’s children.

Golding believed that without the hold of civilisation that all humans would descend into this primal state to survive, but that this evil would also arise. Golding thinks of the island as a sort of Microcosm of the world as if trying to warn us what would happen if civilisation were to go The first episode that I have chosen is one where the character Jack goes hunting for pigs. We can tell that some time has past because his hair has grown although we’re not sure how much time. Jack also does not care for his appearance, choosing to wear no shirt and the only thing keeping up his trousers his the rope that holds his knife.

When we first saw Jack he was worried about his appearance and even though it was very hot he made his choir walk in line and he also wore his cape and hat, now he bothers with neither. The fact that he has a knife means that he either made, which is unlikely, it or he smuggled it aboard the plane so this means that this hunter was always inside him but that civilisation and adults meant that it didn’t show. He seems determined to kill this time, unlike when he failed to kill the pig when they first explored the island.

The point is only strengthened when he Golding says that Jack has bothered to make a spear. When Jack is hunting he does not hunt like you would expect, his hunting is instinctive and Golding stresses that he acts like an animal, “dog like on all fours” and “ape-like”. Golding also stresses that the way Jack hunts is instinctive “Jack himself shrank at this cry with a hiss of indrawn breath”. He uses his all his senses, which is unusual as normally humans mainly use their sight. But as Jack he is so primal he uses smell, to see if the droppings are warm.

When he gets onto the pig run he draws himself up to his full height, like an animal would before it strikes its prey or if it was on the defence because it wants to make itself seem more powerful. Jack clearly wants the kill. He seems to have forgotten that to kill would mean muck blood but he still wants to kill ” hard patter of hooves, a castanet sound, seductive, maddening – the promise of meat” The first time he tried to kill he found that he couldn’t do it because of the blood but now it is almost as if he wants to do the kill so that he can prove to himself that he can do it.

It seems as if he wants to kill for the blood more then the meat. This shows that the hold of civilisation he slipping and that the more evil part of his nature is coming through, and that he is regressing into savagery quickly. The second episode happens later in the book, we’re never told how much time passes, but it shows that the boys have regressed back and that with the boys returning to savagery there comes superstition and this irrational fear.

The boys do not know what it is and even though the boys that cling to the last remnants of civilisation claim that it doesn’t exist but no one believes them, even themselves and they are still afraid of what they have named ‘the beast’. When Jack starts his own tribe it is obvious that he is not thinking about getting off the island but more of him and his tribes survival. He is thinking about the how and now and not of the long term so showing that he is becoming primal. It is also apparent that he is a leader and this tribe will be dictated by Jack, and that there will be no democracy unlike Ralph’s tribe.

The boys seem to think that Jack will make sure that ‘the beast’ will not come at them, and Jack is so sure of his dictatorship that he is even telling them that they will not dream so much. This also reminds the reader that they are boys because they seem to think they can control about what they dream. When he goes hunting with his newly formed tribe, it becomes clear about how far they have descended into savagery, as they have stopped thinking that the pigs are living things but are seeing them as ‘bloated bags of fat’.

And the fact that they are going to leave some of the kill for the pig shows that they have descended to savagery so much that they have given into superstition and irrational fear, and that they seem to think that the beast is real and that in leaving a sacrifice it will mean that the beast will leave them alone. They have lost the chains of civilisation, and the only thing that makes them the least it civilised is the fact that they are wearing their black caps

The pig that they have chosen is one that has piglets so in killing her they are also condemning the piglets to death, so they are causing unnecessary hurt on the pigs as they could have chosen a pig with no piglets, this is not rational as this kills of the future generation and if the continue like this then it means that they will run out of food. When they are hunting it says that Jack was ‘happy, and wore the damp darkness of the forest like old clothes’ this tells us how often jack has been hunting and how easy and at peace he is even though they are going to kill the pig.

They follow the blood trail and it leads them to the place that Simon uses to meditate, although he’s hidden at the moment. The fact that the death happens in this place of harmony, spiritually and goodness means that evil is finally taking over everything. The butterflies, which stand for hope and peace, are replaced by flies which are dirty, it has become tainted. The hunt is described with sexual imagery, as if it were a rape, ‘the sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her’, ‘Jack was on top of the sow’, ‘wedded to her in lust’.

The use of these words strengthen the evil of this act and how the death and torture of this pig goes beyond survival and shows us how sadistic and evil this act is. Roger needlessly causes the pig pain by stabbing with his spear, becoming sadistic and evil he has slowly regressed from savagery from when he was throwing stones but threw to miss to now where he purposely causes pain. Jack at the end of the kill is flicking blood at the boys as if it were a kind of game, he is very different from the boy who landed and could not kill a pig, to now where he thinks it a game of sort.

It is Jack though who cuts the head off and leaves it in Simons place as a sacrifice for ‘the beast’ This scene shows us how the killing of this pig goes beyond that of survival and that when the constraints of civilisation are gone they become only worried about their survival and nothing else, but they cause pain to the pig before killing it which didn’t help their survival they did it merely for the pleasure so making the act truly evil. The third episode shows us the true evil and the depths of savagery that Jacks tribe has gone to.

Golding stops referring to them as individuals but as a mass ‘solid massive menace that bristled with spears’, ‘anonymous devil faces’. Jacks tribe all now have their faces painted, when Jack first had his face painted he felt he could hide behind the mask and so truly succumbed to his primal nature so now that they are all painted they are truly a primitive tribe. When Ralph and Piggy arrive to ask for Piggy’s glasses Jack isn’t there but hunting, when he does come back from a successful hunt, it is as if that now he is so primal he can hunt better with no chains of civilisation.

Golding mentions that the carcass has ho head so this means that they offered it to the beast. Piggy glasses represent clear-sightedness and since he lost them he it is as if they’ve lost their clear-sightedness and piggy is no longer pragmatic and Ralph’s lot have lost everything. When Ralph and Jack first attack each other it is never to kill, it is as if they are play sword fighting, but when Roger throws the rock and kills Piggy Jack realises that he can kill and that there are no boundaries then he starts to really attack to kill Ralph and not just injure him.

When Piggy is shoved off a cliff, the conch is also destroyed, ‘ceased to exist, broken into 1000 pieces”. This means that freedom of speech; democracy, unity and order are all gone. Jack has no regard for people, and in his society only the strong survive which Piggy wasn’t so in his eyes he didn’t deserve to live. The death of piggy is ironic because it is like the death of a pig. Pigs are weak and so is Piggy and it doesn’t matter if the pigs don’t survive, so it doesn’t matter if Piggy dies and as the have no regard for pigs that also have no regard for Piggy and human life.

It is Roger who throws the boulder that destroys the conch and Piggy and afterwards has the hangman horror about him but can still torture Samneric. Roger adopt the role of executioner in the tribe with the rest of the tribe looking up in awe at him as he has taken that step further than the rest of them, he has killed on purpose. Now that he has killed he can do it again. The killings have worse, first there was the boy with the mulberry mark who died from negligence when the fire went out of control, then there was Simon, but he died when they were in a frenzy and no-one realised what they were doing.

But Piggy’s death is something that was calculated and no-one cold excuse what Roger had done. This episode shows us that in human nature the strong can prey on the weak with no civilisation and no rules, and with no rules there is anercy. And that there are different types of people, those that succumb to their evil desires or those that resist the evil. It also shows us group mentality that people can be like sheep or follow those because they want safety. Golding wrote this story to have many meanings both moral and religious.

I find myself agreeing with Golding on some aspects of the novel. I believe that mankind doesn’t have an essential illness but that we do have the ability for great evil but also great good it is up to us to choose. I think Golding was very clever to use children instead of adults as this gets his message across to the reader better then if it was adults because everyone, and especially when this book was first published, associates children with goodness purity and innocence. Overall I thought this was a very thought provoking book.