How Does Golding Use Symbols In Lord Of The Flies

In the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Golding uses symbolism in every possible way to represent something in our own lives that we can learn from. For example, items such as the conch, piggy’s glasses, the fire, the beast represent humans impulsive emotions, such as the need for order, intelligence and power, hope and fear. Golding’s book ingeniously uses these ideas to almost make fun of our impulsive emotions, such as the islanders fear of a “beast”. In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses physical objects to symbolize involuntary human impulses and emotions enhancing the story. One of the symbols in Lord of the Flies is the conch. The conch represents the longing for order and power. From the beginning of the book when Ralph blows the conch for the first time, everybody wandered towards the sound. Nobody had established it as the meeting call, but their natural necessity for order and leadership caused them to respond and

The fire symbolizes hope, which every human needs to have the will. There must always be hope or something to work towards to get you out of bed in the morning. Though hope isn’t always a tangible thing, Golding enhances the story by representing the boys hope as the fire, it represents their best hope of getting rescued and off of the island. As Ralph is addressing the boy’s failure to keep the fire going, "The fire is the most important thing on the island. How can we ever be rescued except by luck, if we don’t keep a fire going? Is a fire too much for us to make?...Look at us! How many are we? And yet we can’t keep a fire going to make smoke. Don’t you understand? Can’t you see we ought to—ought to die before we let the fire out?" (Golding 31). This quote shows how important the fire was to them, it was their one rational thing to have hope in. They tried to focus all of their energy, their goal was to keep the fire going. And this motivated many of the boys to collect branches and