Right And Wrong In Lord Of The Flies

“Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act” (Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority). In life there is always a choice to be made, and in most circumstances there is most likely a right and a wrong option to choose from. William Golding addresses this inevitable cycle of life through the youth of society in the novel Lord of the Flies. The children’s constant struggle to choose between right and wrong and for the most part, choosing wrong; has readers of the best-selling novel perceiving its purpose is to expose the embedded evil mankind possess. Furthermore, by using characters as young as 6 years old and seeing them with such bloodlust just a few

In fact, it was quite the opposite. One of the very first things the group of young british boys did when they landed on the island is vote on a chief, who ended up being Ralph. This moment is when an instant divide happens on the island between good and evil because the antagonist of the story, Jack Merridew, instantly loses respect for Ralph which down the road results in a horrible turn of events. The most prominent reason that there becomes a divide is that no one knew exactly why Ralph should be leader they just had a gut feeling, “...What intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch (Golding, 22). The divide becomes significant when the organized system of labor for building shelters and keeping the signal fire fails because Jack and his hunters decided they should go hunting for meat instead of cooperating and following the instructions made by their fellow leader. A more prominent event that occurred was when the signal fire caught a big portion of the island on fire, critics argue that this is a direct representation of Golding’s theme of inborn