Personification In Lord Of The Flies Essay

Words: 395
Pages: 2

Demon Boys
Through dehumanizing personification, imagery, and barbaric diction in this passage of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s rhetoric illustrates the boys’ growing savagery and loss of humanity as they turn into a mindless creature capable of unbelievable cruelty. The passage begins as Simon runs into the crowd of feasting boys to reveal that the beast is just a man with a parachute. Immediately the circle of boys engulfs him, its “mouth… crunch[ing] and scream[ing].” The boys have become inanimate object, a circle, with its own “mouth” moving as it likes, representing the dehumanization process that the boys have gone through where they lost their individuality. Golding’s personification describes the circle as a single ravenous being acting on its own, revealing that the boys have lost all rational thinking and are consumed and controlled by the beast within them. They move and act as one belligerent being which suggests the destructive savagery that the boys have come to embrace.
Trapped in the jaws of the ghastly multi-headed beast, Simon makes a desperate attempt to escape. As he “struggle[s] forward,” the boys follow suit and “[a]t once the crowd surge[s] after” him as if he were their prey. The boys catch Simon, and
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The boys have lost all individuality as no words are even needed between them to communicate, but instead they act as a single life force under the same twisted mind. The mind that controls the boys is ending Simon’s life in a barbaric and painful death, as the boys seem to not even hesitate to recognize their former