Christian Sacraments In Lord Of The Flies, By William Golding

Through his allusions to Biblical stories and Christian sacraments in Lord of the Flies, William Golding argues that following Christianity can protect one’s soul from succumbing to the darkness of humanity but that those who embrace the evil in the human heart to escape fear are only trapped further by it and destroy their hope of peace.
Throughout the novel, Golding demonstrates how fear inspires even young children to commit violent deeds. For the boys on the island, this fear stems from their traumatizing experiences; they have fled from England to escape the atomic bomb and crashed on a deserted island with no one to protect them. To manage the powerful emotions that arise from their situation, the boys desperately search for a sense

The boys are given a chance to be rescued from their fear-stricken lives but stubbornly reject it to continue their violence. After Simon discovers that the beast is a pilot’s corpse and runs to tell the others, he stumbles into their ritualistic dance and is mistaken for the beast: “...out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind...the sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. [The beast] was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on a hill…At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws” (Golding 180). The boys have descended even further into savagery from their brutal slaughter of the pig by pointlessly killing another human being, who was attempting to help them. Their fear of the beast and worship of evil has progressed until a “thick, urgent, blind” desire to kill and destroy completely overtakes them and demands that a life be sacrificed. The boys unconsciously justify this decision by forcing themselves to see Simon as the beast and ignore that he is trying to tell them about “a body on a hill.” Listening to Simon would have freed

Throughout the novel, he draws parallels between Christ and one of the boys, Simon, who remains civilized as the other boys descend into savagery. After helping Ralph attempt to build shelters, Simon goes into the forest and picks fruit for the crowd of littluns that follows him: “Then, amid the roar of bees in the afternoon sunlight, Simon found for them the fruit they could not reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands” (Golding 60). In chapter 14 of the Gospel of Matthew, we hear about Christ feeding a multitude of over 5000 people with only two fish and five loaves of bread. Likewise, Simon appeases the “endless, outstretched hands” of the littluns with the fruit he plucks from the trees. The similarity between the miracle performed by God and the generous deed executed by the quiet boy points to a deep relationship between Simon and the Christian faith. Another allusion to Christ is the “roar of the bees,” which are symbols of God for the sweetness of His mercy and the sting of His justice. Frequent mentions of bees and honey are found in the remainder of the chapter, further indicating that Simon can be viewed as a follower of Christianity and an exemplification of the values it promotes. Through