Lord Of The Flies Dehumanization

In both William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, the characters’ morals are tested when put through traumatizing events classified as dehumanization. In Golding’s novel, Jack, the antagonist, constantly looks to seek leadership over Ralph, the protagonist, and Piggy, Ralph’s partner, through his indifferent actions of killings and being selfish. Golding’s novel, set in WWII, is about a group of young British boys stuck on an island with what seems like no escape. In Beah’s memoir about the civil war in Sierra Leone, Ishmael tells the reader the journeys he went through as a child. Unfortunately for Ishmael, he was a child soldier that was a victim of the process of dehumanization, but Beah also had the privilege

William Golding’s novel stays true to Golding’s hypothesis of how humans generally pull toward evil, but Ishmael Beah shows that through the right process of rehabilitation, humans will make the right decision. Golding’s book portrays that all human beings lack the ability to pick the right decision after dehumanization. Beah’s memoir on the other hand, disproves Golding’s hypothesis by showing that eventually humans will make the right choice. When Jack gives no time for Ralph to react to the death of his best friend, it represents how Jack is indifferent through his lack of feelings to those who are hurt. Ishmael Beah was about to kill another human being, but as he walked to the body, he told us that he had no feelings toward the rebel fighter. Even though Ishmael had a lack of heart, he redeemed himself by choosing to kill the monkey, so no one else had to be in the same predicament. As Ishmael Beah and the boys from Lord of the Flies eventually found freedom, only in A Long Way Gone do we witness the generosity a human being possesses. Now, we are only left with the faith that humans will rather pick the noble quality, like Ishmael,rather than the unethical trait like Jack