What Is Piggy's Glasses Symbolize In Lord Of The Flies

Symbolism in “Lord of the Flies”

“Lord of the Flies,” a classic novel written by William Golding and published in 1954 had quite a few symbols in it. In this novel there is a small group of boys that crash land on an island. They manage to remain civilized for a while until one of the survivors starts a new group of savages. In the end the boys are rescued while attempting to hunt down the original leader. A ship comes to their rescue when they see the smoke from the island, which was due to a boy setting fire to the island to lure out the leader. Two symbols in the novel were Piggy’s glasses and the beast. These two symbols are recurring throughout the whole novel and are important to the storyline. One of the symbols in “Lord of the flies” is Piggy’s glasses. These glasses referred to as specs by Piggy himself, are used to start the signal fire which is the only hope for getting rescued. The glasses symbolize hope innovation and cleverness. First of all, the boys use Piggy’s specs to create a fire, which Ralph the leader reminds everyone that it’s their only hope for getting off the island. When the boys attempt to create a fire for the first time they fail until they use Piggy’s glasses. “ ‘ Chief?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘What’ll we use for lighting the fire?’ ‘ We shall take fire from the others’” (161). “ The chief

In short the beast represents evil and fear while Piggy’s glasses symbolize cleverness and innovation. Golding connected these symbols to the real world fairly well. For example when something or someone is clever or innovative, people can get greedy just like in the story. Another way how William connected the symbols to the real life world is how everyone is evil inside. The boys in the novel turn evil and savage, while in the real life world people show evil even if it doesn’t seem like it. Anyways, the symbols mentioned before are relatively important to the novel “Lord of the