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Illness In Lord Of The Flies

Satisfactory Essays

Another example of mankind’s essential illness is Ralph’s loss of morality. He is viewed as the main protagonist and his purity represents how goodness could still be found on the island. But the audience sees him quickly give in to the temptation of evil. Ralph is overwhelmed by an energetic and frenetic environment, and attacks Robert in the following scene: “Ralph too was fighting to get near [Robert], to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering” (Golding 114-115). In this excerpt, animal-like behavior takes over Ralph, one of the last “good” characters on the island. Ralph is assumed to be a leader in the novel and represent man’s goodness, but when his dark side is shown, the reader …show more content…

The conch shattering on page 181 signals the destruction of the island’s scant society. Like order, the conch in Lord of The Flies is fragile. Since the beginning of the book, the conch had been a sign of the humanity the boys had left behind. The boys’ respect for the shell is shown when it is described as “...deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay eighteen inches of shell...covered with a delicate, embossed pattern” (Golding 16). This quote signifies that the conch is seen as a beautiful object by the boys. The conch being introduced in the excerpt is the only other time in the book when there appears to be beauty on the island, except for when Simon spoke of nature. The conch represented order, peace, and law. It had been respected, and viewed as an alluring object by the boys, until its final demise. Everything on the island utterly falls apart once the conch seized to exist. Piggy, and the intelligence he brought, also left with the conch when both were crushed. Without any intellectualism or order, the only thing left on the island is savageness. The evil in the boys is most prominent without the restraints of civilization detaining it. Therefore, the destruction of the conch is a way that Golding shows mankind’s essential

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