Compare and Contrast Jack and Simon from Lord of the Flies

“Lord of the Flies” by William Golding is a savage tale of a group of boys who survived a plane crash and became stranded on a mysterious island. At first there is hope of a rescue and there is a sense of order amongst the boys, but as as time goes on the boys become uncivilized and chaos overtakes them as well as the fear of an awful Beast that lives on the island. One of the themes in the book is based on moral principles in the sense of good and evil in man. Two characters that contribute to this moral or Biblical theme are Simon who resembles Jesus and Jack, being the most savage and violent of the boys, who favors the devil. On the outside you may not be able to detect who was the kind or who was the mean person. Both boys were described similarly because living on the island had affected them in the same way. Simon is described as having hair that was a coarse mop of black hair hanging down, dark skinned, barefoot, and wearing only the remains of shorts. Jack is described as having long hair, skin that was dark with a mess of freckles, barefoot and dirty. Besides them both not paying much attention to their physical appearance the similarities stop there. In reality, one is cruel and savage and the other is kind and civilized. Simon cares for and tends to the others as if they were family, while Jack is selfish and only cares about his own well being and is fixated on killing as many pigs as he possibly can. The more cruel Jack becomes, the more control he takes over the group and they begin to follow his lead and behave violently. Simon concentrates on what needs to be done to get rescued and Jack would be content to live on the island forever as a savage. Just like Jesus understood the moral truth, Simon realizes that the Beast is not an animal, but rather the savagery that man is capable of. He tries to reveal this to them, and just as Jesus was crucified for the truth, the group beats Simon to death. The way that Simon and Jack