Biblical Allusions in Lord of the Flies

Did your parents ever tell you about the first time that you disobeyed them? Mine have. I was next to a hot wood stove at my grandparent’s house, and my parents told me not to touch it because it was hot. But, of course, I just had to touch it now that I was told not to. I wasn’t egged on by my sister or my cousins; I touched that stove of my own accord. And of course, it all went down from there. My inward desire to be stubborn and selfish was expressed though disobeying my parents- In the end, I got burned. Similarly, in Sir William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, biblical allusions are used to give additional meaning and depth to the book and to show the ways in which humans transfer their inner evil into outward behavior. Evil doesn’t begin from the outside world; instead it begins in the core of human beings. The novel Lord of the Flies shows the breakdown of society without authority, a code of conduct, and failure to maintain morality. Although the story seems straightforward at first- just some boys on an island- the true meaning can be hidden from the reader using biblical allusions. These biblical allusions are not a central theme as Lord of the Flies is not specifically religious. There is no direct mention of the Bible; however, certain characters and symbols directly connect to it. Golding uses these allusions to form a more complex story with additional layers. Interestingly, Golding hardly believed in God. After his traumatic experiences in World War II, he tried “to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.” There is little more innocent than a group of young boys singing in a church choir. However, the boy’s innocence is presented as deceptive. In a letter to a friend sent privately, Golding says that “one of our faults is to believe that evil is somewhere else”. He believed that people mistake the origin of evil as being external, yet the boy’s evil was internal despite attaching it to their characteristically