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Fear In Lord Of The Flies Essay

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H.P. Lovecraft once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is of the unknown.” No matter where someone is, what time they live in, or who they are, there will always be fear. In the novel Lord of the Flies, a group of boys including those of Ralph, Jack, Piggy, and Simon are trapped on an abandoned island after fleeing from Britain during the time of WWIII. At first, the boys are civilized and even vote for a leader, but reality sets in and the children’s civilized government ceased to survive. In the Lord of the Flies, fear was present since the first chapter of the novel. At first, there was only a fear of consequences and boredom. Then it grows into the fear of an unknown ‘beastie,’ …show more content…

These boys have been on this isolated island for such an undefined amount of time that as a reader, it can only be assumed that some of these characters have lost much of their sanity and have grown into a lifestyle of savagery. At first, they claim that they will never become savages, for they are British, and the British are the beast at everything, or so they claim. The longer the boys remain on the island, the more fear of the beastie and the growth of the potential of the war between Ralph and Jack, the more savage and display of brutality and slavery, the boy's sense of morality and civility is completely gone. Their innocence goes along with it. They are no longer little church boys – but brutal savage beings completely misguided by an even more brutal fascist like leader. For example, on page 190 of the novel it says, “Jack held up the head and jammed the soft throat down on the pointed end of the stick which pierced through into the mouth. He stood back and the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the stick.” This shows the boys fall into savagery and how all of the fear and war ruined their only hope at

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