Humanity In Lord Of The Flies Essay

In the novel The Lord Of The Flies, the author forces the reader to question society and humanity in general. William Golding, an author who won the Nobel prize posthumously, wrote The Lord Of The Flies in 1954. It is a story about a group of young boys that are stranded on an island and their eventual descend into savagery. In the story, the boys form a makeshift democracy, electing a leader, the protagonist: Ralph. The democracy eventually falls apart for a multitude of reasons such as fear, savagery, a need to survive, a lack of reality, and a power struggle between Ralph and his rival Jack. Even though many critics say that Golding presented humans as naturally evil, there is enough reason to believe that, humanity is not inherently evil

Fear caused many characters to do what they did. For example, the death of Simon could be blamed on fear, the boys were scared of the beast on the island and were all already in a group. Once Simon came out of the bushes, the group attacked him out of fear, believing he was the beast. On page 187, chapter 9 William Golding wrote, “It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill.The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.” William Golding describes Simon as the “Beast” in this paragraph even though he is not. This shows that the boys truly thought they were attacking the “beast” that has been terrorizing them for weeks. The boys were put into a mob mentality which caused them to throw out common sense and reasoning. The boys intention was never to kill Simon, Simon was loved by almost all the boys and no one wanted to kill him, but the fear of the “beast” caused them to attack Simon without any hesitation. Another factor that played into the death of Simon was the lack of reality of the