Lord Of The Flies

Essay by teenteenageHigh School, 10th gradeA+, January 2008

download word file, 5 pages 4.0

Lord of the Flies

Do you think a group of young boys is the only effective way to set the scene for violence?

The novel Lord of Flies by William Golding is different from its counterparts in the sense that for a book that talks of death, destruction and deals with the question of whether human nature is innately evil its main characters are British boys aged between 5 and 13.

Why did he choose young boys for violence? I believe that it gave strength to the main theme of the book that evil is not created out of circumstances but is inborn. By using boys he was also able to show the decay of society faster as the children's ethics were not completely cemented yet. They could break their inhibitions more easily than an adult has his foundation have already been built. Children tend to make friends easily and break friends easily.

They are impulsive in their relationship. By using this characteristic of children Golding can create rifts between the children easily.

The children haven not even hit puberty; they have no pragmatic sense of real world and are not aware of worldly affairs. They have never before seen murder and war yet on the island they fight a war and in the struggle 2 kids are murdered. The boys are a mixture of choir group and schoolchildren. By using such normal boys as the main characters Golding succeeded in creating the shock and horror factor. Moreover Golding after having served in World War II and having seen its horrors believed that human nature is evil and not made evil by circumstances as many other people thought. The first sign of peculiarity comes when Jack one of the protagonist seems to feel angry at himself for letting the pig...