In William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, the boys stranded on the island encounter a Beast. This Beast becomes a universal fear of all of the boys. Although the Beast in The Lord of the Flies first surfaces as simply an imaginary monster that is attacking the, children it is revealed over the course of their time on the island to not be a literal physical force separate from the boys but rather to be a darkness within each of them that turns them into monsters. At the beginning of the book, the Beast is simply an imaginary monster that terrorizes the littluns. Although the littluns claim that they have seen a monstrous snake living in the woods that eats little children, the older children in the tribe do not acknowledge their claims. They instead liken the littluns’ stories about the Beast to a monster under the bed. They attempt to convince themselves and the littluns that the Beast is only a nightmare, and refuse to acknowledge the existence of something sinister living in the wood even though they aware of it. …show more content…
Although the Beast, has not taken on any physical literal form in this situation, the boys use its presence to explain what they cannot understand and do not want to acknowledge, that being the rotting corpse of the pilot still attached to his escape parachute. The boys are only willing to finally acknowledge the reality of the Beast, that they have been aware of from the start, if it allows them to ignore other frightening realities around them in the forest and if they can make it into something that they can either kill or appease. Now, the Beast takes on the form of a monster that lives on the mountain that is to be killed and hunted and, according to the children, can