Good And Evil In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

“All human beings are commingled out of good & evil” was a quote once said by notable Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. This quotation discusses and supports William Golding’s, the author of Lord of the Flies, belief that all humans have a distinct character flaw that, when left unchecked by morals and laws of society, will eventually corrupt the individual. In Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, it’s shown how due to their environment and lack of supervision, the young boys slowly progress and evolve into barbaric, bloodthirsty individuals.

Throughout the novel Lord Of The Flies, the boys on the island are continuously faced with numerous fears. Subsequently there is nothing on the island which they fear more than the beast. The beast is not a tangible object that can be killed or destroyed by conventional means, but an idea symbolizing the primal savage instincts within all people. Its Golding’s intention to illustrate the innate evil inside man through his view of human nature, the actions of the Jack and his tribe, and the relationship between the beast and the school boys.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies presents a story of a group of boys who become stranded on an island together, and in their struggle to survive; some begin to fight for power. Having power makes them feel in control of their situation; however, this power struggle quickly begins to consume them. Golding uses the power struggle between Ralph and Jack, the two main characters, to illustrate the power struggle between good and evil.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a novel about a group of boys stranded on an island with no adults and no rules. Golding believes that humans all have a capability to do wrong, and through The Lord of the flies portrays how certain situations make a human’s capacity for evil more prominent. Golding shows how the boys’ civilization deteriorates from being good British kids to murderous savage people. The novel can easily be connected to the Stanford Prison Experiment, and how what happened to the boys on the island can happen outside the realm of fiction. Golding shows the reader what the Lord of the Flies is in the book and how the namesake of the book is found in all of us.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding is tale of a group of young boys who become stranded on a deserted island after their plane crashes. Intertwined in this classic novel are many themes, most that relate to the inherent evil that exists in all human beings and the malicious nature of mankind. In The Lord of the Flies, Golding shows the boys' gradual transformation from being civilized, well-mannered people to savage, ritualistic beasts.

Although humankind attempts its best at preventing evil actions, eventually evil rises above all else. While humans are living ordinary lives and living in ignorance, evil is always scheming and waiting to slide up behind the turned backs of society as depicted in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. One could argue that this is not the case and that good deeds always overshadow evil and that evil is just an occasional blip. However, what one’s opinion of society does not outshine the cold hard facts of humankind’s natural tendencies; specifically, how things are never as they seem, how easily humans can betray their emotions and how humans choose to ignore difficult situations in the search for an easy

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. After having created everything on Earth, He made man. “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”(NIV Genesis 2:15). Thus, He made Eve from the rib of Adam. God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge but the evil serpent, who was craftier than them, tricked Eve into eating the fruit. Eve later convinced Adam after having argued with him and he gave in. Both were punished by God for having gone against His word and would suffer the consequences of it. “So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden a cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:23-24).

Knowing William Golding took part of World War II, we as readers can understand why Golding wrote Lord of the Flies and other survival-fiction novels. When the story was released in 1954, Golding described his book as "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." It is unmistakably obvious to anyone who reads this book that Golding is trying to exaggerate the good and evil in the boys on the island. Throughout the book, we learn that people, including children, are not pure goodness. Deep inside there is an evil constantly trying to rise to the surface of our minds. Golding proves that eventually the evil within us will destroy us. Golding saw in World War II what

While William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies, chronicles the group dynamics of young British boys from a state of civilized decency to one of uncontrolled depravity after they are stranded on a desolate tropical island for a time, it also disturbingly reveals a base brutality and primal savagery that surfaces when survival is at stake. The protagonist of the novel, Ralph, is one of the oldest boys on the island. He claims a position of leadership due to his pragmatic survival skillset. Golding describes Ralph as quite tall for his age, handsome, and able-bodied, and he tells us explicitly that he presides over the other boys with naturally with a sense of authority. Although Ralph lacks Piggy's intelligence, Ralph is a calm, sound, communicative, and sensible thinker with a strong moral code. However, Ralph is put under the same instinctive influences that affect the other boys, as demonstrated by his participation in Simon's killing. However, Ralph does not hold his position for long, and is soon usurped by Jack, the head of the adventurous, aggressive, and dauntless hunter tribe. With Ralphs’ dedication to justice and equality, he represents the societal stability that is hand-and-hand with democracy. His unwavering push for rescuing and return to the normalcy of society forms him into the most relatable, realistic, civilized, and independent character throughout.

Many years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a theory that we humans are a species which evolved from animals that have inhabited the Earth for many years, and he believed that we were civilized, intelligent, and logical life forms for these very reasons. In the novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding there is a prominent theme of good versus evil which reveals that maybe humans are not the civilized human beings that they were said to be. William Golding carefully netted this theme with his utilization of literary device such as his symbolism. Golding uses this simple story of English boys stranded on an inhabited island to illustrate how destructive humans can be when implanted in a impoverished environment where they

About 37,000 years ago Adam and Eve were God’s first human creations. There was no sin or evil on this earth until Eve ate the apple off of the forbidden tree. After Eve made that mistake that caused the rest of humankind to be born with original sin. Humans are essentially born bad and start to act good when they like a person or feel comfortable with them. In the novel, Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding, he has us questioning whether humans are essentially born good or bad.

Human beings are brought into the world not knowing the difference between right and wrong. They test limits, have evil thoughts, and say horrible words, the result of this can be easily summed up to one simple phrase; Human beings are naturally born evil. If human beings were brought into the world with naturally good instincts, they would never have the feeling of remorse or guilt, so why can they feel it anyway? This is because human beings posses malicious thoughts no matter how they were raised. By saying this, it proves the major point that Golding expresses, in his novel Lord of the Flies. His theory is that children are boring with the ability to do evil and be evil without someone there to stop them. In the novel Golding remarkably expresses his theory through boys who are on a deserted island. The ending result was fire, intentional murder, and above all else, savagery, but this is what ends up keeping the surviving boys alive. Golding's book expressed that everyone is born savage and remains in that state until they die. No matter what circumstances a person has been born into, human beings have natural everlasting evil instincts, resulting into the key of savagery, but this, perhaps is what keeps society functioning.

Every day people hear about violence in the news, about terrorists, shooters, and robbers they do not associate with themselves. Comparatively, innate evil hides within everyone, as Golding claims. The novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, takes place on an uninhabited island where a group of young British boys finds themselves stranded without any adults. Overcoming their joy, the boys develop a society of sorts, finding ways to survive and be 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. With the aid of the masks they don in order to hunt, as well as to identify savages, they revert to the nature of pre-civilization beings. Due to their loss of identity and effectively, their domesticity, they become savage. 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, start to show. The id is the impulsive section of the mind containing the inner desires. Moreover, the ego and superego, which represent the consciousness, restrict it. Golding presents the battling two sides of society, savagery represented by Roger and civilization represented by the conch and Piggy, throughout the novel. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the actions of

Civilization and order can be found within every society, and this is no exception within the group of boys in the beginning of the novel. Throughout the exposition of the story, governance over the group of boys was unknown. No order was established to influence the boys to cooperate and fulfill the needed tasks to get off the island. Although, “there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance...yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart” (Golding 22). The conch shell was able to control and demand a large audience. It provided Ralph with a

As the cynical philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated, all humans possess an innate wickedness that will provoke chaos in a state of nature. This philosophy can be applied to the boys’ looming barbarity depicted in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as their savagery aggrandizes overtime in their island that was once a paradise -- a natural environment without civilization and supervision. The boys eventually come to the point of destroying one another as well as nature, and these occurrences are epitomized by scars. In this novel, scars symbolize the wayward savagery of the boys that emerges ever since their arrival, the violence of nature that responds to their lack of civility, and the loss of innocence due to the inherent evils of humans.