Allegory In Lord Of The Flies

H. P. Lovecraft wrote: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Fear is a chemical reaction that takes place in the same part of the human brain as excitement and happiness; that is what makes it so addictive to some (Javanbakht & Saab 1). However, fear is not always a good thing; it can compel people to do things that in normality, they would not do. Lord of the Flies is an allegory written by William Golding to exemplify fear and its effect. Golding also uses the book to symbolize the events of World War II. The characters in the book point back to important figures of the war with actions that match up in ways to show how impactful the war was. In the aftermath,

The two meet up with other kids from the crash only to realize that they are completely alone without adult supervision. Working together, the children come up with their own form of civilization with attempts to keep themselves grounded in British morals. At first, everything seems to be running smoothly; they have food, water, chore systems, and even a rescue fire, but nothing can stay perfect for long. One of the boys named Ralph is elected as leader, then boys get a plan of survival together. When a boy named Jack decides it is time for him to overthrow Ralph, things start to go bad. Jack forms his own tribe that starves for blood and killing. Ralph constantly tries with desperate efforts to keep the boys alongside himself true and steady in their old studious ways; he is unsuccessful and two of his closest friends are killed by Jack’s tribe. Just when Ralph thinks nothing else can go wrong, he becomes the target. Approximately a few seconds prior to Ralph’s expected murder, they are rescued by a Navy team. William Golding wrote that story to put World War II in a simpler form for people to see the horrors of it without shoving it bluntly in their faces; he had to grab their attention, making them care, and think about what was really going on. World War II was one half of the

Concentration camp survivor, Ibi Ginsburg, said, “We were constantly hungry, humiliated, we worked, but we knew that the end was coming... We just hung on to life” (Ginsburg 1). The people in the camps went through the worst. They were brutally beaten and abused constantly by soldiers in the most inhuman ways; some were even sent straight to death camps, where they got off the train, then walked straight to their deaths (History.com 1). The maltreatment level is incomprehensible to us today, unless a person is put into the exact experience. Ralph, in Lord of the Flies, saw that, "The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away” (Golding 79). The people in the holocaust had their lives ripped away from them; they lost everything that they understood in the world. Golding shows that as Ralph starts to see the evil, he watches the boys around him lose their teachings and morals. In the book, a boy named Piggy says, “I know there isn’t no beats- not with claws and all that I mean- but I know there isn’t no fear either” (Golding 72). They went through a plane crash, experienced death and murder, and they were alone for the first time without adults; they had to figure out how to survive on their own. In both the war and the book, everyone is terrified of the beast that faces