Lord Of The Flies Fear Quotes

FDR, a former President of the United States, once said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. This famous quote was used in a time of distress among the citizens. The people of the United States were out of control because they didn’t know what was happening or how bad it was. Roosevelt satisfied the people of his country by telling them that the only thing they had to worry about was the fear that they make up themselves. Lord of the Flies by William Golding is about an abundance of schoolboys who get in a plane crash and get stuck on an island with no adults. These boys are forced to fend for themselves and learn what is right and wrong on their own. Unfortunately, these boys suffer a difference of opinions and begin to drift

The boys start to take things out of hand and kill each other thinking that it is the right thing to do. One of the boys named Simon is a character from this novel that tries to stand up and tell everyone not to be afraid, much like FDR. Simon wants to relieve them of their fears of the “beastie”, which happens to be just one of the boys’ fears along with being scared of the dark or the unknown. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies can be analyzed using characters and symbolism in order to defend the theme of fear being a figment of one’s imagination when in times of trouble.

There are many symbols in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Some represent evil or hope for a change while others symbolize fear, or more specifically fear of the unknown. In the novel, the boys struggled with a ‘threat’. The reader is aware of this when, “Ralph laughed, and the other boys laughed with him. The small boy twisted further into himself. ‘Tell us about the snake-thing.’ ‘Now he says it was a beastie.’ ‘Beastie?’ ‘A snake-thing. Ever so big. He saw it.’” (Golding 35-36). This quote is an example of how the boys do not believe the littluns when they came to them warning about the beastie. All of the boys begin to believe the littlun. Because of this,

He represents the vision of reality when everyone else is traumatized with an imaginal fear. A reader can know this when Simon says, “‘As if,’ said Simon, ‘the beastie, the beastie or snake-thing, was real’” (Golding 52). This quote demonstrates how Simon believed what the littluns told the biguns. The littluns are younger than the biguns are, so they don’t know the difference between fake and real. When the biguns start to believe too, the fear became real among those who didn’t accept it, for example, Simon. Simon begins to believe that the beastie is real and dangerous without any evidence. Simon represents the theme of making up a fear when one is in times of trouble because he is the character that focuses on reality, but that changed when he gives in to the temptations of make-believe. One can tell that Simon then modifies back to the character he was when the Lord of the Flies says, “‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head” (Golding 143). This example from the text shows how Simon was communicating with a pig head that could talk. Of course, the pig head talking was a hallucination of Simon’s. The Lord of the Flies, or the pig head, was telling Simon that there was no such thing as this alleged beast that the boys were talking about. In result of this interaction, Simon decides to enlighten the rest of the boys with this joyful news. Unfortunately and