Lord Of The Flies Dbq Analysis

What exactly is the “beast”? Is it a demon? A human? In “Lord of the Flies”, a group of boys crash-landed on an uninhabited island with no adults. They were evacuating during the time shortly after World War II. Some of the younger boys claimed to see a “beastie” or a “snake-thing” at night. Many people are perplexed when it comes to the query: “What is the beast and what does it symbolize?” There are numerous definitions about what the ‘thing’ haunting the children signify and it evolves throughout the book. In the beginning, the beast represents the children’s fear. “The Terrors of the Unknown” says that the children “began to people the darkness of night and forest with spirits and demons”(Doc A). The boys started to imagine the things that frightened them as reality. They turned their fears into a creature that exposes himself at night. In “Now he says it’s a Beastie”, a young boy who

As stated in “Maybe it’s only us”, one of the boys says “maybe there is a beast… what I mean is… maybe it’s only us… Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s illness.”(Doc F). Simon eventually found out that a human could be capable of behaving like a terrifying creature. In “the Beast is Human”, Simon, the same boy who understood how cruel humans could be, “sets off, weak and staggering, to tell the other boys that the beast is human.”(Doc E). The boy found the body of the man terrorizing the children on the island and realized how being cruel mankind could be. People are capable of something so harsh and tormenting that they could be considered monsters. Quite a few readers of the “Lord of the Flies” share controversy over the question “what does the beast represent?” Although it changes throughout the plot, the “beast” has three basic meanings. The creature symbolizes the fears of the boys on the island, the war that caused them to be stranded, and the savageness of the humans causing the