Lord Of The Flies
Human nature is inherently evil; William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies implies this. Golding, the author of the allegoric novel is a survivor of World War II. He experiences loss, fear, death, and violence during the war. Golding's reality of evil allows him to express this in the novel. He sees human nature as a harm to the world. Golding conveys his message that the defects of society trace back to the defects of human nature, through an island of school boys as a microcosm of the world.
Golding portrays human nature as being inevitably a wound to the world. He symbolizes a plane as a scar on Coral Island, portended from the evils of human nature. A place filled with school boys is shot down, crashing the island. Ralph, a school boy, is first to come out of the plane, "all around him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat" (7). Through Golding's experiences in the war, you can see how he uses a fighter plane the boys get shot down in as a reference to evil. The school boys refer to their crashed plane as a "scar". They understand how they were attatcked and why they ended up on Coral Island, " ' when we was coming down I looked through one of them windows. I saw the other part of the plane. There were flames coming out of it' " (8). The boys don't understand why they are being attatcked. They don't know of the "evils" trying to harm them. The plane is a symbol for the impactions that evil have on the world. Golding is essentially trying to show the power that the malignity of mankind has on the world.
Golding proves evil is within everyone, even the most innocent of children have a nature to be malicious. The constant duality of the boys and their struggle over power effects the benevolence in each of them. The school boys on Coral Island are led by Ralph, a symbol of order. Ralph and Jack, the symbol of anarchy, each take leadership roles. jack is in charge of hunting, the hunters, and keeping the fire signal on the island smoking. The...
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