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Civilism And Civilization In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

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Every day we hear about violence in the news, about terrorists, shooters, and robbers that we do not associate with ourselves. However, hidden within everyone is that innate evil as is shown through Golding’s story. The novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, is set on an uninhabited island where a group of young British boys find themselves stranded without any adults. Overcoming their joy, the boys develop a society of sorts, finding ways to survive and get rescued. However, the civilization divides. Some of the boys go astray, their primitive instincts emerging through their actions as they become more violent. The boys lose their identities as cultured humans. They revert to the nature of pre-civilization beings with the aid of the masks they don in order to hunt as well as to identify savages. Golding develops the characters, specifically Ralph and Jack, showing the loss of their innocence and steady maturing. However, overly exposed to the wild, Jack and the hunters’ id, or their instincts unbounded by society or morals, materializes. The id is the impulsive section of the mind that contain the inner desires and are restricted by the ego and superego which are the consciousness. The continuous battle between savagery, represented by the Lord of the Flies, and civilization, represented by the conch and Piggy, is presented throughout the story as the two sides of society battle. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, it is depicted through the actions of the boys that when separated from civilization, one’s inevitably evil nature emerges, their true attributes exposed as their ties to society dissolve.
With the assistance of the masks and the deindividuation that occurs when acting as a group, the boys on the island lose their sense of identity. Jack and his hunters made clay masks in order to hunt, claiming the pigs they preyed upon did not smell them but saw them. As he set the mask upon himself, “[Jack] began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling” (Golding, 64) The mask was what “Jack hid [behind], liberated from shame and self consciousness,”(64) As Jack puts his mask on for the first time, it foreshadows the future violence that will come. He snarls as if he was an animal, showing

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