Evil In Lord Of The Flies

Imagine landing on an unknown island with complete strangers and no adult supervision, the only goal is to work together to get rescued. Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding is an allegorical representation of the theme that everyone has the choice to act upon evil. Golding shows his theme by writing about a group of English boys whose plane landed on a mysterious island. The boys need to find a way to survive and work together to be rescued. Golding’s message in Lord of the Flies about humanity is that a society without order will force children to choose between good and evil. He uses the characters, Jack, Ralph and Simon to show this through characterization.
The one character who embraced the evil instead of resisting it is Jack.

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages.”(Golding 42). This is when Jack started to become more of a leader on the island, he wanted to take a position that had power. As the novel progressed Jack started to become more animal-like, and Jack started to embrace his evil. Jack wanted to become the sole leader on the island, and disrupt all of the order that was set in place. This was the turning point for Jack, Jack started to do everything that was best suited for him, and he did not care about the consequences. The big event that caused the island to go into chaos is when Piggy was murdered. This lead Jack to take over sole control on the island and kicked Ralph out to live on his own. Jack’s main goal was to get rid of Ralph, he did this by organizing a manhunt and lit the whole island on fire to find Ralph and kill him, “Ralph stirred restlessly in his narrow bed. One changed nothing! What could they do? Beat him? So what? Kill him? A stick sharpened at both ends…”(Golding 198). Jack used his power that he now had to do what he thought was best for the island. Since all of the order was gone on the island, he took over as chief but Jack ran his tribe in a

Simon was a character throughout the novel who showed kindness and he never gave up hope. The first act of kindness Simon perform was when he helped the littluns, “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. When he had satisfied them he paused and looked round. The littluns watched him inscrutably over double handfuls of ripe fruit.” (Golding 56). This is the first time that Simon stepped up to be a caregiver to the littluns. After this took place, Simon took the role as a caregiver to the littluns. Simon also never gave up hope while being on the island, he is the only character that showed hope all throughout the novel, he never let evil change his mind about anything, he always stayed positive. When Ralph was feeling down and losing hope for ever being rescued Simon was there, “you’ll get back to where you came from” (Golding 111). Simon wanted to reassure Ralph that there still was a chance for hope. Simon also did not want to let evil overtake the island, so he always kept the idea of hope that the beast could not be real. When Simon went up to the cliff to see if the beast was real he found out something that would change all of the evil on the island, “The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water.