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Argumentative Essay On Lord Of The Flies

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“You get to very bad places one step at a time, so you’ve got to watch those steps” Jordan Peterson says that people grow evil very slowly, and it’s a slippery slope. When you take one step off the path then the next step doesn’t seem as bad. Golding shows this very clearly in his book Lord of the Flies, especially through the character Jack when he and the other boys are stuck on the deserted island for a long period of time. When the boys first got stranded on the island they didn’t know what to do so Ralph took charge, he essentially created a civilization on the island and they voted for who was going to be chief. Things were running pretty smoothly for having 12 year olds take care of themselves. What really shows the difference of how …show more content…

Once Jack starts getting restless and isn’t liking the way that things are going because the boys are turning to Ralph instead of him, he decides to take charge and go by himself with a few other boys. Jack's group ends up collecting almost all the other boys and they turn into savages. It got so bad that when Ralph and the 3 other boys tried to get fire from the others to make a signal so that they could be rescued the savages launched a rock and killed Piggy, one of the boys, and kidnapped the other two. Ralph then finds out that night from the kidnapped boys that “‘they hate you, Ralph. They’re going to do you.’ ‘They’re going to hunt you tomorrow.’” The group of boys have gone so off the rails and become so evil that they literally decide that they are going to kill one of their friends just because he doesn’t want to join their group. This really showcases the absolute 180 that those boys took from not even wanting to kill a pig for food, to hunting and killing their friends because of a difference of …show more content…

It was a gradual step to get there. It started with the uncertainty of their surroundings and the fear of the beast. Because of that it caused them to not think rationally all the time. Then because they were killing the pigs constantly caused them to not be so reluctant to kill something. It was a necessary thing but it caused them to be desensitized. Then when they hunted the sow and they took the head of it and put it on the stick as an offering to the beast to keep it on their good side, that was a step that caused them to be more savage like. A big part of what pushed them to do such bad things was mob think. Mob think is what happens when you’re in a big group and something bad starts happening but instead of others stopping it and recognizing it’s bad it just feeds it because everyone’s energy is building on each other. This happened when they were doing the dance just after the savages separated from the main group and they ended up killing Simon. The boys went one step at a time and it caused them to be evil

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486 Words | 2 Pages

Once they kill Simon it explains deeply about how they kill him and how cruel and brutal it was. They kill him by biting and clawing and acting like savages. Simon says that it's themselves that is the beast and it shows in the part of the story how they act savage and

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994 Words | 4 Pages

The cause of this can be honed down to one single event: the first hunt. In Chapter 4, the text reads, “The gutted carcass of a pig swung from the stake, swinging heavily as the twins toiled over the uneven ground. The pig’s head hung down with gaping neck and seemed to search for something on the ground. At last the words of the chant floated up to them, across the bowl of blackened wood and ashes. ‘Kill the pig.

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1276 Words | 6 Pages

The boys barbarically beat down Simon who appears to be a beast to them. The fear blinds the children and they do not even question what it is. They lose their sense of right and wrong as they forget the rules of society and commit a murder. Even though, Simon was screaming out to them and trying to send his message, the boys ignored it and continued to beat him down. This shows that the boys are so desperate that to get rid of the beast, they lose all sense of their humanity and kill their own friend.

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841 Words | 4 Pages

In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of stranded boys survive on an island with no adults, soon their sense of morality falls apart and violence takes place. The loss of morality causes the boys to break the rules and become violent. Eventually, the boys become uncivilized and stop caring about their actions. They get to a point where they disregard logical thought and resort to violence without reason. As the story progresses, the absence of morality causes violence to reign among the boys.

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458 Words | 2 Pages

The boys divide into two major groups as the story goes on. the hunters, led by Jack, and the "civilized" group led by Ralph. Each group strengthens its commitment to its core motives as they come to agree on actions and choices. In the end this mob mentality and groupthink result in hostility and violence between the two groups.

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726 Words | 3 Pages

William Golding’s fictional, British novel, Lord of the Flies, presents a character that serves a two-part function as a “scapegoat” and a certain commentary on life. During WWII, a group of British boys are being evacuated via plane when they crash and are stranded on an island without adults. As time progresses, the innate evilness of human nature begins to overcome the savage society of young boys while Piggy, an individual representation of brains without brawn, becomes an outlier as he tries to resist this gradual descent of civilness and ends up shouldering the blame for the wrongdoings of the savage tribe. Up until his untimely death, Piggy is portrayed as the most intellectual and most civil character in the group of stranded boys. Right from the beginning, Piggy realized that “[they] got to do something,” (8) and he recognized the shell Ralph had picked up as a conch.

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862 Words | 4 Pages

In the book The Beast is the reason for their civilization to fall big for three reasons, it made everyone very fearful,violent, and people fought which separated the boys from a group. One reason The Beast is responsible for the downfall of their civilization is that it made everyone very scared and fearful. My first piece of evidence happens when everyone is having their first meeting. A little boy with a birthmark says that there is a bestie in the woods and as he is telling everyone the narrator says ”There was no laughter at all now and more grave watching”(Golding 28). This shows us that people become scared of The Beast even the first time they hear it from someone.

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973 Words | 4 Pages

Upon arrival, the boys are innocent children only concerned with how they will get home. As time passes, the boys lose their purity and slowly become corrupt by mankind’s essential illness, evil. One of the older boys, named Jack Merridew, was only concerned with hunting from the moment the boys’ plane crash landed. Ralph, the official chief of the group insisted that they

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882 Words | 4 Pages

Every child comes into this world as a selfish, manipulative, cruel and stubborn being. It is the parents and society that teaches children how to function in a civilized world, and societal laws that keeps them under control. William Golding wrote this novel in the early years of the cold war and the atomic age. In William Golding's classic novel Lord of the Flies, Golding uses Jack, a young savage who looks to lead a group of stranded kids on an island with no food, no rules, and no adults. The effect freedom has on Jack has turned him into a savage because he does not have to listen to anyone since there are no adults on the island.

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954 Words | 4 Pages

With Jack having the majority of the boys, there was only Simon, Piggy, some littluns and Ralph left, who decided to stay instead of going off with Jack. . Ralph wanted to resolve things in order to survive, but Jack's eagerness to be leader was already too much for them to be able to resolve things that easily. Towards the end of the book, Ralph wanted to go talk things out, but when he did, it resulted in Piggy’s death and Ralph having to hide away from the group. As Jack and the other boys were looking for him, Jack found that setting the island on fire would be his best option, not caring if Ralph dies because he wants to be superior to everyone, and Jacks hatred towards Ralph made him even more eager to get rid of

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794 Words | 4 Pages

(Golding,70) the boys only protected themselves if anything was going to happen but since there was no beastie present they let their thoughts flow to the point of killing the boys just for the dumbest reasons, for example Simon . Evilness took over the innocent boys they were, which made them think that he was the beast. The rules werent set first so everything got out of control, the boys lacked civilization which made everyone follow one leader, Jack which led them all to evil

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934 Words | 4 Pages

“His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, the knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long, satisfying drink.” Ralph and the boys crash-landed from a plane and woke up on an island and realized that they stuck with no way of getting out. Their only hope was to signal someone. As time marched on, almost all of the boys had become so savage-like that the few who remained with morals were in a fight for survival.

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1263 Words | 6 Pages

People have come to agree that a “good” world is one where order, equality, and kindness all reign supreme over their negative counterparts. The problem with this good world is that these qualities are not the values which every human default to. Correctly demonstrated through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, George Orwell’s 1984, and experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment, human nature at its core is exploitative and aggressive. These traits are the entire driving point behind the story of Lord of the Flies, being the reason that the group of once civilized boys descends into chaos and destruction all so rapidly. This book attempted to display what would happen if a group of boys were to revert to the ways humans tend to behave

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431 Words | 2 Pages

I don’t know why we did it, or even how it happened. Our group recently split up because Jack and Ralph disagree on some important ideas, and there was getting to be a lot of tension. Ralph still wants to get rescued, but Jack seems to have forgotten that there is a world outside of the island. Jack called a meeting and asked for the boys to vote if they still wanted Ralph as chief. The did and Jack was very mad.

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1228 Words | 5 Pages

Lord of the Flies Essay What would happen if boys from a civilized culture were unexpectedly thrown together on an island? William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, provides a potential answer. Despite them trying to form leadership to keep everyone civil, the island’s environment changed them. The environment and situation caused them to change as they had to be responsible without adults, they all began to act like the animals they hunted, and they were able to commit murder.

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