What Does The Fire Symbolize In Lord Of The Flies

There are several items in Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, that are symbolic like the conch shell and the glasses, but an interesting symbol is the fire. Throughout the book, the boys constantly use fire. They obviously use it to cook but they use fire as a beacon in case a ship happens to pass by. The fire symbolizes survival, rescue, but also destruction. The first, and most simple, thing that fire symbolizes in survival. If the boys wanted to survive, they were going to need to cook some food; so that is what they did. Of course they could find food that they didn’t necessarily have to cook, but fire would enhance their diet. When Jack and the Hunters kill the sow and decapitated it, they realized that they didn’t have any fire because they had just split off from Ralph’s group. They decided to raid Ralph’s beach and steal some fire. Once they had everything they needed, Jack came back and said, “Tonight we’re having a feast. We’ve killed a pig and we’ve got meat” (128).

The original reason the boys started a fire was to signal any passing ships. They believed that if any ship passed by and saw a fire, it would come and investigate; even if there was a war going on all around them. In the middle of the boys’ second meeting, Ralph mentions the idea of making a fire atop the mountain. “So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire” (35). At the sound of that, the boys immediately got to work. This idea of building a fire gave all the boys hope that they would soon be rescued. They tried to keep this fire going for as long as they could, but it caused some