Human Nature In Lord Of The Flies Essay

TITLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! From many various events in the past century- the Stanford Prison Experiment, World War 2, the child murder of James Bulger- a huge question has arisen in physiology: does the human nature impulse a person to live morally or immorally. In William Golding’s novel, “Lord of the Flies”, he writes about a group of boys who become stranded on an island with no adults or anything from the civil world. As they try to live on the island, a power struggle occurs between two main characters: Jack and Ralph. The island falls to savagery under Jacks rule, where some boys won’t ever make it off the island, while others will be so changed they forget their own name. As the book unfolds to worse and worse tumult, the reader

Since there was nothing civil about where they were, there was nothing for the boys to aspire to and to remind them of how they should act. In chapter 5 of Lord Of The Flies, Golding writes, “For now the littluns were no longer silent. They were reminded of their personal sorrow; and perhaps felt themselves to share in a sorrow that was universal.” (Golding 87) When Golding writes this, the boys, particularly the younger ones, are sad because of their previous life and what they miss. This directly shows that the boys have lost everything about society and civil living, and that it affects them, for they miss it. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, Shuttleworth states, “The prisoners became institutionalized very quickly and adapted to their roles.” When this happens in the experiment, the prisoners have everything stripped away from them that resembled a civil society and in return are treated like animals. But rather than revolting against it, they adapt to their roles and become used to being treated like that. In the same way, the boys are like this. When they lose their past civil society, the boys miss it, but over time as Jack comes to power, the boys adapt to their new roles quickly and act as animals, or more correctly, savages. Throughout the novel, the absence of anything civil serves to conform the boys to act immorally

The boys had no authority on the island, and therefore had no direction and would act differently because they won’t get in trouble for their actions. In addition, they had been disconnected from everything about a civil society. On the island, they only had memories of a civil society, and therefore, they quickly forgot how to act and what to do. Moreover, there were benefits for the boys to be uncivil as they were able to get meat and allowed to have fun with little work. Through and through, the environment around the boy's caused them to change how they acted and what they