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Lord Of The Flies Dbq

Decent Essays

“They became motionless, gripped in each other’s arms, four unwinking eyes aimed and two mouths open…” Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is a story about a plane of English schoolboys that is shot down in the near future over an unnamed island in the pacific ocean. The meaning of the story depends on the meaning of the beast. In Lord of the Flies, what does the “Beast” symbolize?
When the Beast is first mentioned, it represents fear. According to Claire Rosenfield in her Psychological Analysis of Lord of the Flies, the boys are frightened by the island in the absence of their “comforting mothers” and they “externalize these fears into the figure of a “Beast.” (Doc A) We see this in action when a little boy with a mulberry birthmark claims to have seen it: “He says he saw the beastie, the snake-thing, and …show more content…

Simon is the first to realize that the beast is “only us” and tries to give voice to “mankind’s essential illness” (Doc F). Later, when Simon finds the dead parachutist, he attempts to tell the others the “Beast is only human.” (Doc E). Rather than listening to his words, Simon is brutally attacked and killed by them: “There were no words and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws” (Doc F). Ironically, Simon, the sensitive boy with the goal to tell of man's violent nature, is instead mistaken for the beast. Therefore he is murdered by the true, human beast: the boys with “teeth and claws.”
Even though the symbolic idea of the beast in Lord of the Flies goes through many changes, they all are connected. Fear of the others turns into war, and what is war if not the expression of the savagery of humans. The symbolism of the beast doesn’t really change, it just becomes more recognizable as the story goes on. The reader is forced to come to the realization with the simple fact that the beast is in all of

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