Theme Themes In Lord Of The Flies

Theme Statement: All civilized objects, activites, and souls, have inner savage which is held back by forced law, until power brings out the savage in everyone and everything.

Being in a state of childhood innocence can mean life or death when fighting to survive. The boys in William Golding's Lord of the Flies become marooned on an island when their plane crashes while evacuating them from England during the war. As they begin to realize that they are going to have to work with what they have, they attempt to run the island in the same way as their society back home. Golding reveals an underlying theme of innocence and the loss of it through the young boys on the island. In order to reveal this theme, Golding highlights specific characteristics of the boys and brings attention to certain events throughout the survival process.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a classic novel and portrays just how the society surrounding us can corrupt our once pure nature No one is born a killer, no one is born with an intense compulsion to kill, the island that the boys are stranded on has a very unusual, corrupting society; A society that erodes the boys innocence through the power struggle between Jack and Ralph, readers see the transfer from innocent to savagely through the hunting and Piggy’s death.

In the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, a group of English boys in their adolescence are stranded on an island. They crash-land while being evacuated because of an atomic war, so the boys must learn to cooperate with each other in order to survive. The boys are civil at first, but the bonds of civilization unfold as the rapacity for power and immediate desires become more important than civility and rescue. The conflict between Ralph, the protagonist, and Jack, the antagonist, represents the conflict between the impulse to civilization and the impulse to savagery, respectively. In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses Ralph and Jack’s struggle for power to show that greed and lust for power can corrupt the best

William Golding’s experiences in World War II deeply influenced his views on man’s nature. Golding’s allegorical novel, Lord of The Flies, explores the frightening and consistent, yet ignored, truths of man’s nature. British schoolboys board a plane in hopes to escape their war torn land. Unfortunately, the plane is shot down, thrusting the boys into a deserted island and leaving them to their own devices. At first, the boys look to find independence and freedom on the island where civilization no longer matters. However, it is soon clear that the boys cannot simply run away from their natural tendencies. Jack, previously a choir leader, is among the stranded boys, and slowly but surely rises to power on the island. Jack’s corrupted authority fuels his inner selfishness and leads him to consciously feed off of the fear of isolation and annihilation of his blind followers, thus proving that authority can overpower one's self-control.

Not only did Jack allege his power through conspicuous hunting acts, but he also imposed power with his violent mannerisms towards Ralph, Piggy, and the others. Jack is not the only power figure in this story. In turn, the British official that appeared to rescue the boys has a stature of power along with the British army. Golding expressed his love of irony with the British soldier on the island as well. The boys had been creating their own war on the island, and they were, in a way, mimicking the war that had been happening on a world-wide scale. Golding did not stop here, as the British soldier then observed the boys savagery, he reprimanded them for not being more proper and British. “’I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you’re all British, aren’t you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—‘” (202). How ironic, that despite the soldier’s talk of being proper and “English,” he too was being a savage. He too, was in the middle of a war.

The dark nature of humans that William Golding explored in Lord of the Flies is a complex topic, not only diving into the true evil of human nature but its causes and effects. Golding uses these boys who are stranded on an island to show the state of evil that one can be at. Set in WW2, the isolation that the boys are having from the world creates a little world for themselves. At the start of the novel, they make rules and regulations to make a democratic civilization just like how it is in the outside world. However, just like in the outside world, things begin to fall apart as defects of society are revealed.

I thought, by myself…I thought I might kill.”. The reader can see from this that Jack’s vocabulary is composed of only monosyllabic words as he is preoccupied only with thoughts of slaughtering. We can also interpret that Jack feels as if he has to kill in order to gain respect for himself. Jack shows this pride when he does eventually kill a pig and he retells the story of the hunt to the rest of the boys. He and some of the boys re-enact the murder in a savage and primitive style. Therefore, we can see how his behaviour has been affected as a result of his compassion and need to hunt. This change in his behaviour is very significant as hunting is how Jack begins to establish his power over the group. Soon after the killing of the first pig, Jack is able to become more powerful and Ralph begins to realise this so he says, “I’m calling an assembly.”, as he feels in danger of losing control.

To be innocent is to maintain purity and lack corruption. The Lord of the Flies is a novel written by Nobel Prize winning author William Golding in 1954. The novel is about British schoolboys getting stuck on an island that is uninhabited. The story is about their struggle to survive while facing obstacles that force them into savagery and a loss of innocence. This loss of innocence sets the plot and outlines an intriguing story. Throughout the novel, William Golding makes it apparent that a loss of innocence occurs due to violence, lack of leadership, and the need to kill.

William Golding presents our main character, Ralph, with an antagonist that has animalistic, egoistic, and intimidating qualities whose name is Jack Merridew. The dynamics in Jack's character are very evident from beginning to end. At first, he is a civilized choir boy from England; even he himself stated "We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages." He began to let the island change the persona he had; he became a boy whose sense of self was stricken by savagery. Jack chooses a conflict of working against Ralph for the power and control that was not given to him directly. He denies several times the power of the conch Ralph possesses at group meetings, and eventually, the power hunger overtakes him as he creates his

In the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding,there are many themes in the novel. First of all,a loss of rules and rule enforcement can often lead to crime. Second, natural evil can lead to civil unrest. Third, a society that degrades into ruthlessness and savagery is not usually marked as anarchy but rather as a totalitarian system of exploration and abusive domination. All of these themes are present in the book and can also be represented in real life.

The theme of the Lord of the Flies is that all people are born with evil inside of them. The book shows how even Ralph, the kindest person on the island, is able to commit evil when he tries to harm Roger when Jack is pretending that he is the pig. “Ralph too was fighting to get near to get a handful of that brown vulnerable flesh”(Golding 114). Another part that shows this theme is when everyone took part in killing Simon. “The sticks fell and the mouth of the circle crunched and screamed”(152). The final point that I found on this theme is when Roger willingly kills Piggy. “The rock struck piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist”(181). Those are some of the instances that show all people are born with evil.

Imagine being stranded on an island with all boys and no adults. This is how it is in William Golding's book Lord of the Flies. The most significant theme in Lord of the Flies is that of the similarities of the boys' society's relationship to the real world. Ralph represents Great Britain and its struggle against the Germans (Jack). Jack represents Germany and the control they wanted. Piggy represented France and its alliance with Great Britain (Ralph). The boys' society on the island mimicked the real world's violence. These are all reasons why this theme is most important.

Jack, negatively portrayed in comparison to Ralph, tempts the boys with an array of forbidden treats, indulging their most violent, suppressed desires in an attempt to lull them away from the security of Ralph. In a sense, Jack is negatively compared to Ralph throughout the novel, and is often portrayed as confused and violent, very aware of the evil inside of him: “The real problem that arises among the boys involves their own inner nature…” (Johnston 2). When his plan fails, Jack feels as though his seat of power is threatened and therefore resorts to terrorizing, threatening and essentially forcing the boys to join him and align themselves against Ralph, alienating them from their former, comfortable life-style and thus making what they once failed to appreciate all the more desirable.

The author of the book Lord of The Flies, William Golding lived and wrote this story during World war two, during this time Nazis were being heavily scrutinized by the public for following Hitler's evil ways. In this story Golding's theme found in his notes claims “It was simply what seemed sensible for me to write after the war when everyone was thanking god we weren't Nazis. I’d seen enough to realize that every single one of us could be Nazis”(Golding). This theme is an accurate representation of the story as it shows how even the most civilized people can be tricked into executing unspeakable crimes Fear,violence,persuasion and deception can all be utilized to convince a person that what was once morally wrong is perfectly acceptable.