Lord Of The Flies Literary Analysis

Lord of the Flies Literary Analysis

If you were stranded on a deserted island, how would you choose to live? Would you hold on to the rules from your old life, or would you forget those conventions in favor of savagery and survival in any way possible? In Lord of the Flies, a novel by William Golding, a group of English schoolboys evacuating the war via airplane crash on an island. Two boys, Ralph and Piggy, want to retain their civility and be rescued. However, there is conflict between them and the other surviving boys. Ralph attempts to be chief and keep order, but the freedom and lack of laws on the island allow the boys to become wild. Eventually the remaining boys are rescued by a naval officer, but they have already been corrupted

The first example is in the end of the novel. The boys have fully given in to their animalistic rage; Jack is leading a hunt for Ralph, and the boys plan to kill him. In an attempt to drive Ralph out into the open, the boys light the island’s brush on fire. It is this conflagration, and not their signal fire, that catches the attention of a naval officer. Throughout the story there is such a stress on the signal fire, and in the end is it the breakdown of society that causes the boys’ rescue. This is situational irony. Simon’s death is another example of situational irony. When Simon sees the “beast” on the island, he realizes that it is actually a dead soldier attached to a parachute. When Simon runs down the hill to inform the rest of the boys, he finds them in the midst of a ritualistic hunting dance. In the frenzied dark, Simon is mistaken for the beast and murdered. Although he is the only one who knows the truth about the beast, and he is about to reveal the truth, Simon cannot not tell the others. Simon does not fear the beast because he knows it only exists in the mind, but in a way it is the beast that kills him. Dramatic irony also occurs during the final scenes. The island is burning, Ralph is being pursued with the intent of murder, and the naval officer steps onto the shore and speaks to them as if they’re all simply innocent children playing a game. Ralph, at his feet, begins to cry in lament of his old life: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (202). The naval officer, who is participating in an adult war of his own, is unaware that the children before him had suffered so greatly at each other’s hands. The irony in this novel poses the question of whether evil comes from an environment and its circumstances, or the human mind