At the end of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the children whose actions were chronicled in the book committed atrocities like murder and torture. Regular children somehow did things worse than anything that they ever could have imagined back at home. This begs the question of what prompted what once were normal children to snap: the circumstances or something that was inside of them all along. The answer in my mind isn’t as simple as one or the other. A winning combination of both spurred average boys into becoming killers, because without something dark being triggered in some of the boys, no one would have even thought about the horrible things that ended up happening. The deciding factor for these boys and their horrible acts was their …show more content…
Roger chose to torture the boys, and eventually he chose to kill Piggy. The experience of the island pulled something ugly out of him specifically, but in all the ways that matter, he was fully aware and in control of his choice to murder another person. The other murder, Simon’s, is different in that no one person chose to kill the boy. No one in particular summoned the malice to beat him to death, but the group as a whole lost their individual values and assimilated into the group. Chapter 2 of Opening Skinner’s Box explains that people abandon their core beliefs in order to satisfy some primal need to conform. Though in the chapter, it applies more directly to submitting to a specific authority, it also references an individual abandoning their own opinion (even if they are obviously right) in order to match with a larger group of people. In times of stress, we find comfort in being part of a group. The boy’s experience on the island could definitely be considered stressful, and the sheer amount of danger that they were in was a large enough scare to the boys to cause them to abandon their good British morals and adopt a mob mentality. They lost themselves and killed a boy with their bare hands in a sea of dirt, sweat, and fear