preview

Evil In Lord Of The Flies Research Paper

Decent Essays

We often react to people or situations that appear unfamiliar to society’s accepted norms without knowing why. The fear of the unknown is a very powerful influence in all sentient life. It can take over our bodies and make us do unthinkable things that would seem impossible. Your mind can do its best to try to shield you from the fear but it’s still there festering in the back of your mind like a mold growing and getting worse. Within William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Lance Morrow’s “Evil”, Linh Kieu Ngo’s “Cannibalism: It Still Exists”, and Brent Staples “Black Men and Public Space” all fear something that they do not know. From the beginning of Lord of the Flies the young English boys had been put into a situation they could not …show more content…

Understanding evil and how it works is very important and is all over the world and can never be truly explained from one point of view. “Padrica Cain Hill, former bank teller, Washington mother and wife, dresses her three children one morning, makes breakfast for them, smokes some crack cocaine and lets the kids watch cartoons. Then with a clothesline she strangles eight-year-old Kristine and four-year-old Eric Jr. She tries to strangle two-year-old Jennifer, but leaves the girl still breathing softly on the floor. When the police come, Padrica Hill says she loves her children. Why did she kill them? ‘I don’t know,’ she answers in apparently genuine bewilderment. ‘I hadn’t planned on it’.”(Morrow) Morrow gives numerous examples that are both vague and real life events that define evil and how it brings out the good which makes you think that evil isn’t as bad as it seems. “Does the good become meaningless in a world without evil?”(Morrow) Evil is just a matter of perspective and can take any …show more content…

In Brent Staples “Black Men and Public Space” a young African-American man walks the streets with other white people who treat him as if he is a criminal without knowing his character. “It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into – the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.”(Staples 153) They fear him because they do not understand what he does or what he wants; they act like this because of how they stereotyped young black men; evil criminals who are looking for trouble. The people who pass by don't know until he greets them as they pass by with a hello and goodbye; then they continue to walk as they don't want anything to do with

Get Access