What Does The Fire Symbolize In Lord Of The Flies

A wise author named William Golding once tried to prove that man is essentially evil by plopping fifty plus british kids on an island due to a plane crash and writing out their turn to insanity. He used a certain literary element called symbolism, where an object is taken and put into much deeper meaning or value to the story. In the novel The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the symbols of Piggy’s glasses, fire, and a pig head on a stick are used to prove that man is evil through a lack of society. The first symbol used is a pair of glasses owned by a boy named Piggy, a smart yet fat child. His glasses take a turn from fire to death throughout the time of this novel. In the beginning of the book Jack suggests using Piggy’s glasses to

The fire connects to Ralph and Jack because they are the ones who make the fires, and it goes from rescue to death which leads to rescue. At the beginning of the book, Ralph stresses the importance of the fire and says, “We’ve got to have special people to looking after the fire. Any day there may be a ship out there” (Golding, 52). Later on in the novel a ship goes by, but the fire is not going, leading to Ralph being outraged that nobody was looking after the fire. A loss of concentration on the fire led to a loss of a chance at rescue, making the fire a symbol that could be forgotten if not focused on. After a while, when Jack leaves the group for his own tribe, Jack makes the fire be important for cooking. When he gains more people, he uses the fire constantly to cook the meat he gets with his hunters. This leads to the theft of Piggy’s glasses to make a cooking fire, which starts to lead the fire away from a purpose of rescue which is what it was supposed to be for at first according to Ralph. Eventually, the hunters use fire to attempt to kill Ralph who is hiding in the woods. The fire was so big that, “...a great heaviness of smoke lay between the island and the sun” (Golding, 278). Ironically, the smoke created by the fire leads to the boys being rescued by a Navy boat that saw the island burning down. However, the fire was made to cause death, not rescue, showing how objects can