The Lord of the Flies is a novel that presents to us the story of a group of boys who are stranded on an island, almost completely isolated. These boys, who have absolutely no adult supervision, must figure out a way to survive and/or find help to get them off the island. However, many different complications arise, which makes it harder and harder for them to focus on survival. The most prominent of these is the beast, which appears throughout the course of the whole novel.
At first, the boys have a meeting to discuss how the group of boys will be generally organized. Ralph is picked as chief, and Jack and his choir boys become the hunters. Their society works out for a while until one of the boys mentions a “beastie … A snake-thing. Ever so big … In the woods … [it comes] in the dark” (Golding 33). Although the boys laugh and dismiss this at first as a nightmare, problems arise when other boys swear to have witnessed this beast. Little did they know that this beast would become the thing most feared to everyone on the island. And so it begins: one boy claims to have seen a beast, and all the boys slowly become obsessed with the idea of a beast on the island. Jack and his hunters have become better at hunting, as they have now killed
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He sees Jack and his tribe kill a sow and stick the head onto a sharpened stick, which is placed in the ground as an offering to the beast. This head of the dead pig becomes the Lord of the Flies, and it “speaks” to him. It tells him that “I’m the beast” and says that you cannot kill it, and later goes on to say that “I’m part of you … the reason … things are what they are” (Golding 130). After this meeting with the Lord of the Flies, Simon feels “a blackness within, a blackness that spread” (Golding 131) and faints. Simon is now aware of what causes the boys to act this way. The beast is no longer an actual creature, but an idea that corrupts the minds of these young