Lord of the Flies Essay

Lord of the Rings: Title unrelated As a race, one of humanity’s greatest shortcomings is the inability to control its own desires. Oftentimes, the prosperity of one depends on the decline of another. This is one of the many truths evident in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The novel highlights the decline of a civilized group of British students that are left stranded on an island after a plane crash. As the boys begin to fend for themselves, the events that transpire there expose the flaws of humanity. Golding’s message in Lord of the Flies is that human nature is a constant struggle between law and instinct. He uses the characters Jack, Ralph, and Simon to symbolize the allure of savagery, the fragility of order, and the danger of neutrality, respectively. Jack is one of the main characters in Golding’s novel. Growing up as a choirboy, it’s a given that he should be well-behaved and eager to uphold the traditions of society on the island. Golding uses this assumption to highlight just how deeply the instincts of savagery are rooted within humans. To put it simply, Jack is evil incarnate. As a general rule, Golding uses Jack as the rallying point of all evil within the novel. Early on it becomes apparent that Jack enjoys to kill. His obsession with it is cancerous, and it quickly infects the rest of the choirboys, who he hunts with. (Pig spearing quote here). Although Jack’s obsession with hunting animals may seem, harmless at first, he constantly seeks to expand his influence in the group, and at one point effectively dissolves most of Ralph’s control of the tribe and secures the role of leader for himself. Soon after, he and his hunters hold a feast and invite everyone on the island to eat with them. Using the gift of meat as a medium, Jack appeals to the greed of the boys and convinces them to abandon Ralph and the signal fire in favor of him, who promises to simply eat and have fun. Essentially, he convinces them to abandon the idea of being saved and