Ethical Characters Depicted In Lord Of The Flies, By William Golding

In William Golding’s book titled Lord of the Flies, many young boys stranded on an island are tested on their moral obligations towards one another. Eventually, the child Jack becomes an extremely savage leader and sets out to kill Piggy and Ralph. Adolf Hitler, the ruthless dictator of Nazi Germany during World War II, also succeeds in taking Jewish people’s lives, on a much larger scale. Jack, Hitler and their followers share several similarities, as they all possess unethical mindsets and agreed that murder is acceptable in order to maintain power and fulfill their savage selfish desires.
Throughout Lord of the Flies, Jack begins to display more villainous behaviors as he goes against the chief of the island, Ralph. As a hunter, Jack believes that hunting animals for food is the most important way to survive on the island and “he [tries] to convey the compulsion to track own and kill that [is] swallowing him up (Golding 51). His desire to hunt and kill become increasingly dangerous and begins to make the other boys feel threatened and fearful of his actions. Also, overtime, he exerts control over many of the boys in his tribe and creates his own dictatorship on the island, with horrible consequences such as Simon and Piggy’s death.

The tragic death of millions of innocent Jews began when Hitler decided to use his persuasiveness to gain power and enforce his beliefs on the rest of the country. Hitler’s political ideas “blended with increasingly technical racial theories that imagined the Jews... as biologically inferior to… the white northern European race that pure Germans were presumed to belong to” (Green). Similar to Jack from Lord of the Flies, many Nazis blindly welcomed his leadership and took apart in the murder of innocent people as