How would you react if you were stranded on an island? In the book Lord of the Flies by Willam Golding, a group of British school boys get in a plane crash while trying to escape the nuclear war happening at home. While they are on the island they try to make a civilization for themselves, they make shelter, a smoke signal, and they try to get rescued, and yet in making that happen one of the boys, Jack, goes crazy and becomes savage and animalistic. In the end they all attack the one leader that focused on getting rescued and making a civilization. Throughout the book Golding uses symbolism to show civilization, hope, and evilness. One of the symbols in this book is a white shell called the conch, which represents civilization. In the book when they first crash on the island two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy, go to the beach on the island. While they are at the beach they see the conch …show more content…
In the book when they are having one of their first meetings Ralph says “There's another thing. We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire”(Golding 46). It is seen here that in the beginning the boys had lots of hope for rescue and it was their main goal, it was all they worried about. During this time in the story all of the boys also stuck together in hope for rescue. After a while, Jack and Ralph are against each other. Jack attacks Ralph by setting fire to the island, while they are fighting Ralph runs to the beach, he sees a boat and a naval officer come out. When Ralph asks how she saw them she replies "We saw your smoke”(Golding 249). This symbolically shows that if they had kept their hope of getting rescued, and kept the fire going they could have gotten rescued sooner. In this story the significance of the fire is that it is the boy's hope, if the fire goes out the boy’s hope is