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The Ideas Of Evil In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

Decent Essays
What constitutes evil? For millennia, humans have tried to answer that question. Humans have been trying to formulate a code of laws in order to combat evil and protect people. What they haven't considered is the possibility that evil isn't something that is after us but is within us. William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is an allegory showing that while civilization suppresses the evil that resides in every individual, failure to acknowledge one’s own faults will result in chaos. Golding depicts his ideas through several characters with different personalities: the savage (Roger and Maurice), the prideful (Jack), the intelligent (Piggy), the civilized (Ralph) and the kindhearted (Simon).
Golding uses many characters, such as Roger and Maurice, to show that there are those in society that are inherently evil. The only way their evils are kept at bay is through civilization. As the boys on the island develop a routine, the littluns adapt the routine of play time. While some of them build sand castles, Maurice throws sand in one of the little boy’s eyes. “In his other life Maurice had received chastisement for filling a younger eye with sand. Now, though there was no parent… Maurice still felt the unease of his wrongdoing” (Source C). Maurice's desire to harass the littluns without any provocation shows that he is inherently wicked. The only reason he feels guilty afterwards is because he was taught to feel that way when hurting someone else. This scene suggests that
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