Christmas Carol And Lord Of The Flies Comparative Essay

Goldwin Student - Phan 07B, Jan 30 - Feb 3

Comparative Essay

Someone once said, “Change can be followed by two things, order or chaos. ” This is well represented in The Christmas Carol and Lord of the Flies. The Christmas Carol was written in 1843 by Charles Dickens during the Victorian Era, and Lord of the Flies was written by William Golding after being a teacher and fighting in World War Two. Both Ebenezer Scrooge and the boys change a considerable amount throughout the novels. The common theme between Lord of the Flies and A Christmas Carol is the hidden side of human beings and how much we can truly change. Both authors convey this through the use of setting, symbolism, and conflict in their novels.
In both my novels, the setting

The boys must survive on this island, isolated from society. After a not-so-long period of time, the boys start to reveal their savage side and the evil within them. Golding writes, “they lept onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore … but the tearing of teeth and claws.” showing how uncivilized they’ve become on the island; these behaviors aren't human, they’re savage. Also, a little further into the novel, Golding begins to refer to the boys as savages, which indicates that they’ve changed. In A Christmas Carol, the setting is set in a small town during Christmas. But Scrooge's mental state is what we’re really looking at here. He has willingly shut himself out of society. He doesn’t socialize with anyone and stays strictly with business. Like Dickens states, “ as solitary as an oyster”. This social isolation leads him to have a “cold within him that froze his features … no warmth could warm, no wintry weather could chill him”. As Dickens describes, Scrooge is bitter and cold due to his social isolation. Both authors do really well in using the setting to convey the idea that isolation from society, whether intentional or unintentional, will affect you, physically and

The conch is a significant symbol in Lord of the Flies as it represents the order and the civilized nature of the boys before they come to the island and the first few days of living there. In the beginning, the shell is described as “interesting and pretty … the shell was a deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink”, around midway through the book, it is depicted as “Exposure to the sun had bleached the yellow and pink to near-white, and transparency.” This represents how the boys are becoming more and more disorganized throughout the course of the book. In the end, when the conch “exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist”, it symbolizes the turning point when they lose all hope to be civil and become savages, showing how much humans can really change. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas past. The Ghost of Christmas past symbolizes the past Christmases of Scrooge. The Ghost shows him the joys in the past and also the things he regrets. This shows that he used to be a good person but then changed drastically. But seeing this causes him to want to change for the better and in the end, he does. Both authors utilize symbolization to help contribute to the theme of the hidden side of humans and how much we can