How Does Golding Build The Fire In Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies, written by William Golding, is a novel that tells the story of a plane full of English schoolboys, evacuating the ongoing war, crashing near an island, leaving them marooned. With there being no adults or supervision the boys are left to fend and survive on their own. A boy by the name of Ralph is picked as their chief and he organizes fire and shelter. Another boy by the name of Jack, who is leader of the choir boys that were on the plane takes that group hunting. Over the during of the novel, the hunters become savage especially under the influence of jack. Whilst Ralph tries to keep his group civilized the savagery from the boys breaks through ending in a climax where all hell breaks loose on the island. Throughout the

Ralph proposes that they build a fire at the top of mountain on the island so that if ships were to pass by they would see the fire and potentially rescue them. Although they fail at keeping the fire going at first, Jack and his hunters nominate themselves to make sure the fire keeps going. As they attempt to reignite the fire, it results in trees nearby being set ablaze. Golding describes the fire in a way of giving it animal-like movements: “the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw.”(44) In this quotation he foreshadows that eventually power and fear will start to eat away at the civilization the boys have created with each other and in their own minds. By Golding using the word “gnaw”, he gives the impression that power and fear won't fully consume the boys straight away, but will slowly, build up to it to show slowly how all will fail and fall, leading to them losing connections to civilization, and leading up to savagery. This is also expressed in the passage when Golding writes: “The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards”(44). This also foreshadows how as one of the boys turn against each other due to power then this feeling will then attack the other boys and eat away at their morals causing the civilization that they once were to turn into hostiles, causing the boys to split and clash against one