Lord Of The Flies Literary Analysis Essay

Words: 1159
Pages: 5

Lord of the Flies Literary Analysis Essay The novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding crashes a group of boys, trying to flee from a war on an uninhabited island without any adults. This emphasizes the purpose of the novel, which is to expose the human condition, and a major principle in Goulding’s belief of the human condition that beasts “[are] only [humans]”(Goulding 89). The author goes about this exposure with many examples of symbolism and allusions to religion. The arguably most prominent symbol in the novel is the ‘beast’; both a figurative and literal analysis of evil.The meaning of the beast in Lord of the Flies, is to ostensibly project the inner evils that lie in everyone, which is part of Golding’s basic principles in the human condition. The figurative beast is the premise that there is evil inside of humanity rather than a physical monster on the island. Piggy at first hints at the idea that the boys are the beast when the boys are having a serious assembly discussing the likelihood of a physical beast existing. They get into the topic of what the beast would eat if it did exist, and they deem that the beast would eat pig. Simon returns to this by saying, “we eat pig” (Golding 83). Piggy saying that the boys hunt and consume the same thing as the beast exposes the direct correlation between the beast …show more content…
Jack’s group make the beast that Simon hallucinates. Jack’s group goes hunting, captures a pig and offers the sow’s head on a stick to the beast on the mountain as a peace offering. When a dehydrated Simon goes into the jungle, he finds this sow’s head and it tells him that he (the head) is the beast and indirectly the other boys are the beast as well. The pig head is the purest manifestation of savagery in the novel. After the murder of Simon, the boys are incapable of returning to civilization because their evils have taken them