Argumentative Essay On Lord Of The Flies

Imagine you're stuck on an island with a large group of strangers, all within a couple years of you. Would you designate a leader or would it be everyone for themselves? In every group of people, there is always a hierarchy of power. Whether that be at work or with a group of your friends. Most of the time, either one or a handful of people have more power and a larger say in what the group does. Now imagine giving that power to a bunch of adolescent boys with no rules and no adults to govern anything. Nothing good will come from that. The Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel written by William Goulding about a group of boys stranded on an island and forced to survive for themselves. The boys create a society and govern it for themselves,

That they aren’t seeing straight. Simon is Ralph’s friend and quite quiet. He’s always helping the little ones and is a loyal follower of Ralph. Because he is friendly, he has no enemies and the group seems to like him. Because he was intelligent and logical, he doubted the existence of The Beast. “Maybe there is a beast. Maybe it’s only us”. Jack eventually turns on Simon because he is not following him like the others, contributing to him becoming an outcast. By the time Simon figures out that the parachute is not the beast, the group has turned so crazy that they can’t see how they are. When he tries to explain to them, they don’t even see him as a person, they see him as the beast, and they kill him. “Kill the Beast, cut his throat, spill his blood” (168) His death is evidence that the group is no longer thinking or seeing straight. The group is blinded by the lust for blood. They no longer know who or what they are killing. Simon was an innocent and logical boy and was murdered in cold blood even though all he was trying to do was help. The boys were blinded by the thought of killing the beast that it ended up costing Simon his life. There are a few key symbols in the book which represent the slide into savagery. Both the fire and the conch are important indications of the problems the group had. The signal fire is a key indication that the group has changed. Initially, the fire represents

Jack started off as a rude and arrogant boy who showed remorse. Throughout his time on the island that remorse faded away into more animal-like behaviours, to a point where he had lost all signs of civilization. Simon was a kind, caring, logical boy up until the time of his unnecessary murder. He had managed to avoid much of the dark changes that had happened to the boys and was a good measure of the difference between what they were and what they had become. The conch and fire were symbols of the civilized world that the boys had known before. The conch becoming irrelevant and the fire being neglected and ultimately extinguished represented the decline of the island society. The boys never chose to become savages, but their experiences led them down that path. Life sometimes puts situations onto people which they cannot control, forcing them into making decisions that they would never have made otherwise. The parallels between life on the island and life in the real world happen in many different ways to many different