Savagery Lord Of The Flies Analysis

Words: 562
Pages: 3

The novel ‘Lord of the flies’ tells the story of some boys living on an island without any adult supervision, after they survived a plane crash. The boys (or at least the leading figures of the boys) try to establish rules and make themselves into a civilized society so that they could survive out in the island and get rescued. However, due to numerous factors, this attempt ultimately fails, and most of the boys descended into savagery. They even commit murder. At first glance, this story may seem like a simple fight against good and evil, as ‘savagery’ and ‘murder’ are easily connected with ‘evil’. But this is not a story against good and evil, because the ‘evil’ which the ‘good’ has to fight does not exist.

The ‘evil’ cannot be recognized as any kind of force because both ways of life, civilization and savagery, is to provide a solution for the same problem, but in completely different forms. Apart from having something to eat and being rescued, the boys have another big problem in their minds. They fear of ‘the beast’ and the danger they could potentially be in because of ‘the beast’. This fear grows when a few boys accidentally perceive a dead pilot with his parachute on the island as ‘the beast’, and the
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The only ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that drives the boys to become savages only exist inside their minds in the first place. In the story, the lord of the flies exclaims “fancy thinking ‘the beast’ was something you could hunt and kill!” and “I’m the beast” (the lord of the flies claims that he is the beast and the beast is just something living in a person’s mind while the lord of the flies himself is conjured up in Simon’s head. The brain telling itself the thing it’s scared of isn’t real). While both of the solutions listed above tries to solve a problem, the problem was conjured up in the mind of the people who made the solutions. Yet they do not recognize the problem as a problem that they have