William Golding’s allegorical novel “Lord of the Flies” is a castaway novel. Castaway novel became very popular after the Age of Discovery. Most of them is about young men-always Europeans, meet some kinds of accidents, often shipwreck. Finally, they overcome the challenges and come back home. This kind of novel encouraged people to explore the world. And it also gives an impression that white Christian men with “advanced” western culture could conquer the nature, both the wild nature and the human nature.
However, in this novel Golding wrote it in a completely different direction. He used boys instead of adults. This allowed Golding to show the true human nature unconstrained by the social bonds. And this novel is telling reader the process
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The name of this chapter is “Painted Faces and Long Hair”. It builds an image of savages even before the reader start reading it. In this chapter reader can find some early step in the boy’s decline into savagery. In fact, they are also foreshowing. For example, Roger began to throw rocks to the littluns. At this point in the novel, the boys are still keeping their civilization. So that even without parents and school, policemen and law, Roger still doesn’t dare to hurt any one. “Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life,” (Golding 65). Some thing even more important is that Jack painted his face. The painted faces are like masks. It keeps Jack and his hurters from being hurt by their moral and makes them dropped in an crazy mood. In this mood, they got a pig and had great fun, but the cost of that was losing their civilization. The presence of a ‘beast’ become truer, and its influence among boys become stronger. Even the biguns start to think maybe there is a beast. The only character who never believed in the idea of beast is Simon. He told others “What I mean is . . . maybe it’s only us” (Golding 96). Although the others laughed at him, he is the first character to discover that the beast is their fear, is the evil side of human