Innocence In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

Innocence can be depicted as blind trust and ignorance to the world. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), he shows this ignorant side of innocence. The boys that were placed on the island were mainly children under the age of ten and Golding slowly begins to strip away their humanity as time on the island lengthens. In The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Alexander Dumas takes a different approach. Instead of focusing on ignorance, Dumas a naïve and trusting young man named Edmund Dantes. Dantes, who had blindly trust the people around him, was betrayed and thus his perspective opens up to a more realistic view on the world. Collin Heywood is able to define innocence well. The concept of innocence that comes to mind is usually childhood innocence where everything is pure and the kids are ignorant. In Colin Heywood’s article “Child Rearing and Childhood: Changing Conceptions of Childhood” (2001), Heywood explains how childhood was not an idea that existed in medieval society because of the environment that didn’t allow time for childhood. Children were “largely absent from literary works” (Heywood). Heywood went

The children of the island in Lord of the Flies also began to lose of that romanticized innocence. In Diane Telgen’s article “Lord of the Flies: Morals and Morality” she mentions that Golding used the story as “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature”. This means that like Heywood’s article says, children’s innocence isn’t innate and comes from society and the people around the children. So, when Jack and the other boys attempt to kill Ralph, their society-bred innocence broke away. The way Dantes loses his innocence is much different than how Ralph did. Dantes isn’t shoved into a situation that causes his eyes to open but instead he comes to a self-realization with the help of Abbe