Term Papers on Lord Of The Flies

Term Paper Title	Lord Of The Flies
# of Words	1070
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.28

Lord of the Flies

Copyright (C) 1996 By Kevin McKillop
Lord of the Flies Essay
Grade 11 Advanced English

A running theme in Lord of the Flies is that man is savage at heart, always ultimately reverting back to an evil and primitive nature.  The cycle of man's rise to power, or righteousness, and his inevitable fall from grace is an important point that book proves again and again, often comparing man with characters from the Bible to give a more vivid picture of his descent.   Lord Of The Flies  symbolizes this fall in different manners, ranging from the illustration of the mentality of actual primitive man to the reflections of a corrupt seaman in purgatory.

The novel is the story of a group of  boys of different backgrounds who are marooned on an unknown island when their plane crashes.  As the boys try to organize and formulate a plan to get rescued, they begin to separate and as a result of the dissension a band of savage tribal hunters is formed.  Eventually the "stranded boys in Lord of the Flies almost entirely shake off civilized behavior: (Riley 1: 119).  When the confusion finally leads to a manhunt [for Ralph], the reader realizes that despite the strong sense of British character and civility that has been instilled in the youth throughout their lives, the boys have backpedaled and shown the underlying savage side existent in all humans.  "Golding senses that institutions and order imposed from without are temporary, but man's irrationality and urge for destruction are enduring" (Riley 1: 119).  The novel shows the reader how easy it is to revert back to the evil nature inherent in man.  If a group of well-conditioned school boys can ultimately wind up committing various extreme travesties, one can imagine what adults, leaders of society, are capable of doing under the pressures of trying to maintain world relations.

     Lord of the Flies's apprehension of evil is such that it touches
the nerve of contemporary horror as no English novel of its time has
       done; it takes us, through symbolism, into a world of active,
proliferating evil which is seen, one feels, as the natural condition of
man and which is bound to remind the reader of the vilest manifestations
                     of Nazi regression (Riley 1: 120).

In the novel, Simon is a peaceful lad who tries to show the boys that there is no monster on the island except the fears that the boys have.  "Simon tries to state the truth: there is a beast, but 'it's only us'" (Baker 11).  When he makes this revelation, he is ridiculed.  This is an uncanny parallel to the misunderstanding that Christ had to deal with throughout his life. Later in the story, the savage hunters are chasing a pig.  Once they kill the pig, they put its head on a stick and Simon experiences an epiphany in which he "sees the perennial fall which is the central reality of our history: the defeat of reason and the release of... madness in souls wounded by fear" (Baker 12).  As Simon rushes to the campfire to tell the boys of his discovery, he is hit in the side with a spear, his prophecy rejected an...

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