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Fear In Lord Of The Flies Theme Essay

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Fear is more than just Imagination H.P. Lovecraft once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (“Fear”). Fear is a major theme in Lord of the Flies. In the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, a group of British schoolboys are on an island due to their plane getting shot down. There are no adults with these boys, so they have to figure out a way to live and work together cooperatively. At the beginning of the novel things are going well, and the boys appoint a leader and assign different jobs to groups of people. However, as the story develops, things take a turn for the worst. Since the boys are not familiar with the island, it makes them imagine things that create fear inside of them. This fear makes them …show more content…

For example, everyone is in the middle of doing their reenactment of killing the pig when all of a sudden the littluns notice something coming out of the forest. The littluns then shout at the biguns. “The littluns screamed and blundered about, fleeing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror. ‘Him! Him!’ The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest” (Golding 136). It was a dark, stormy night, which made it scary for the boys, and also difficult to see. Then when the boys see the dark figure coming out of the forest, they automatically assume it is the beast. The dark figure turns out to be Simon. The boy’s intense fear of the beast clouds their judgement and makes them beat Simon to death immediately without any hesitation. The boys thought they were attacking the beast that they have been fearing this whole time. This situation shows how fear can take over someone and make them act how they normally would not, because these boys do not hate Simon or want to kill him but their fear ends up making them kill

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Fear has the ability to manipulate people into believing there is danger when there is not, causing them to make rash decisions. These decisions can result in a disobedience to one’s cultural beliefs, as seen in Lord of the Flies and Beowulf. Even though the characters from Lord of the Flies and Beowulf come from cultures built around nobility and loyalty, fear tears them apart from the society they had worked hard to achieve. Although the boys from Lord of the Flies tried to keep their culture’s morals, the fear of the unknown caused the children to betray their Culture.

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In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, fear is the cause of why the boys do certain things. They do things that they would never have done if they were not scared, because they do not want to be scared. The negative actions or behaviors of the boys on the island

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But it is the other way. The beast wants simon to leave forever because he was the one that was brought common sense and knowledge that evil was taking over. So the boys, that had already crossed the line, let the beast take over. And when they did that, they killed simon. So it just goes to show that just by crossing the line, it is hard to get back across.

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Fear, the Destruction of Reason People often use reason in making decisions, but when scared all reason can be thrown out the window. In William Golding’s allegorical novel, Lord of the Flies, a group of British school boys becomes stranded on an island. The group attempts to create a civilized tribe whose goal is to get rescued from the island. Soon any trace of their civilized manor is diminished by the boys fear of the unknown.

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In the next passage, all the boys are making a circle and chanting to be safe from the storm and darkness that lay among them. Suddenly, Simon coming back from his hiding spot in the forest where he spends time thinking about the world erupts forward into the ring of boys, and they believe it is the beast. “The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. The crowd surged after it, struck, screamed, bit, tore. No movements, and no words, but the tearing of teeth and claws”

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This shows that the boys are only afraid of themselves, because they are their own worst enemy. He is the first to figure out that the beast is not an actual beast, and how it is only the boys becoming savage, and starting to be afraid of one another. As Simon began to explain this to the doubtful boys, he was the only one who died knowing the

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Imagine that someone is just a child who has survived a plane crash and landed on an isolated island with no adults. He has no experience in taking care of himself and must figure out how to establish order without turning against another. This is the dilemma that the children in The Lord of the Flies by: William Golding have found themselves in, so one can picture the fear that comes with this more than unfavorable situation. In the novel, the theme of fear is shown most distinctly through the symbols of the Lord of the Flies, the beast, and the conch.

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In the novel Lord of the flies, the beast was one of the main conflicts. Fear is that drove the existence of the beast. Fear is what drove the existence of the beast because fear gave the boys a false illusion of the island being dangerous/evil. For instance, when the boy with the mulberry mark said he saw a snake, in reality it was vines hanging from the trees. The boys are in a new environment where everything was tainted by fear.

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Fear is an unpleasant caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain or a threat.(Mariams Webster). Fear is a thing we all hold inside of us, we are all scared of something or someone it 's just human nature. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding uses a unique way of showing how fear affects human behavior, he used the boys on the island to show how fear affects the behavior of humans and how the boy 's manner and mentality changed over time. From when the boys first came on the island they are actions were normal then later on as the boys started gaining the fear of the beast they started doing abnormal actions they took certain steps because of the fear in them that had been planted by the beast in this case. One of the main reasons fear is spread through the boys is the beast, though we find out the beast is nothing but their imagination.

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The Power Of Fear in “Lord of the Flies”: No Greater Illusion Than Fear Fear is intangible yet has perceptible effects. It plays a significant role in human behaviour. Each individual reacts to fear differently, some overcome it, while others give in to it. In William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” the theme of fear is discussed and it becomes clear that fear has the power to take over not only one’s mind but also control one’s actions.

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William Golding uses the many conflicts in the novel to represent and support his theme of inner evil being present in us all especially when society is not there to restrict us. Golding uses the conflict of Simon’s death as an ideal portrayal of inner evil. All of the boy’s evils are on clear display when Simon’s death occurs. Their inner evil takes over when they start attack Simon thinking that he is the Beast, when in reality he was the one obstructing the Beast in the first place. The boys start to chant “Kill the beast!

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