Corruption In Lord Of The Flies

The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is about a group of young boys who are stranded on an island and attempt to survive. The internal and external conflicts they face descend them into savagery. Golding’s writing indicates many lessons that can be carried over into real life. The isolation and conditions the boys endured on the island changed them, and their uncovered characteristics reflect how, in the right circumstances, the beast within people can emerge. Rather than the island corrupting the boys, the boys and their evil nature ended up corrupting the island. John Marsden once said that “..., words like 'evil' and 'vicious,' they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.” This statement is proven true in the

Wanting to be reduced, the boys create a signal fire that gets out of control and ignites a large portion of the jungle. Nature provides them with everything they need, and they take advantage, are ungrateful, and carelessly burn the forest. Following the burning, the boys have a makeshift meeting about the events, where several of them begin “...shrieking with laughter.” (Golding 45) It is already bad that they can barely acknowledge they did something wrong, but laughing at the sight proves their lack of compassion and true vicious nature. Just a portion of the forest burns but their lack of control and community from the start foreshadows their

The entirety of the land is demolished in flames, the same as the boy’s morals and sanity are abandoned. The fire is created in an attempt for Jack and his tribe of hunters to force Ralph out of hiding so they can brutally murder him. The intensity is at its peak, the island’s destruction is underway, and the boys are hunting one of their own. In an internal monologue, Ralph ponders the consequences of their rash decision. He thinks that “ The fire must be almost at the fruit trees” and wonders, “what would they eat tomorrow” (Golding 198). The hunters no longer think rationally; they are bloodthirsty savages with no regard for what their choices impact or what will happen after. The infection of human viciousness was the inevitable downfall of a delicate, harmonized