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Innocence In Lord Of The Flies Essay

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Lord of Innocence
Throughout the novel Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding, the main characters struggle with survival on an island they are stranded on. All of the boys are very young making the rules up as they go with no experience to go off. Just like everyone, the boys have many accomplishments, but the boys also encounter defeat, which they learn from. Defeat comes with regret, and regret leads to growth from learning and understanding the mistakes made. The boys learn to adapt and grow based on what is happening around them and they learn how to survive. The novel demonstrates that people lose their innocence based on their surroundings. When the boys first arrived on the island they were clueless and innocent. As …show more content…

On the island a lot is happening at one time. They have had a new guest arrive, what they call the beast, a dead parachutist. They have also gone on a pig hunt and killed a pig. Most of the boys take pride and celebrate by taking their spears and stabbing the pig in the rear end. To many of the boys this has an affect on their innocence. Simon was one of the few boys who stayed back to ponder about the whole concept of the beast. “However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick,”(Golding 103). As Simon thought he realized that the real beasts were the boys who were taking joy in killing the pig. Even though the other boys who participated in killing the pig lost some of their innocence, so did Simon. He now understood that the real beasts were only the little boys he was stranded on the island with, including himself. This really affected him learning that they were not the little boys any more, they had to mature quickly and fend for themselves. As time goes on the their innocence is slipping away more and more. The final pages of the novel Lord of the Flies illustrate the impact of loss of innocence on the boys. The young children get rescued by a ship on its way to war. The man that rescues the boys realizes that the children

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This shows the human nature of children and men when they are away from society and order for a long time. If they do not get what they want, then they will drive themselves crazy trying to fight and in turn, become savages, who are focused on killing and hunting. They are blinded by their anger and illusions that they forget about the real point, which is trying to escape from the island and their new goal is to kill each other off so they alone can be the chief of the island, but eventually all the boys will have to end up dying from natural causes or battles if they are not saved by a ship. Their morals are ruined and this leads to further chaos on the island. Once the chaos starts to happen on the island, Ralph also starts to rethink his idea of being chief.

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