What Is The Importance Of Survival In Lord Of The Flies

When people are on the verge of dying, at any moment physical survival comes before anything else. Because of this, we lose many things of our humanity. Several of the characters give great examples of this in the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, especially when it comes to looking at Jack and Ralph. when physical survival has become our main priority we lose our sense of cleanliness, responsibility and our thinking of right from wrong, along with our struggle to have feelings for others. When we’re so focused on survival we don't seem to care about what we look like anymore, so we lose our sense of cleanliness. For example when Ralph realizes what he looks like. “...pressed against his grey shirt against his chest...the folds were like cardboard, and unpleasant”(76). Ralph finally realized that he no longer cared about his personal hygiene or what he looked like. Then when Ralph decided to study what all the other boys looked like he noticed much like himself they were dirty too. “...hair much too long...faces cleaned fairly
For example When Piggy is speaking he mentions, “‘..and them little ‘uns was wandering about down there where the fire is. How d’you know they aren’t still there...him with the mark on his face, I don't see him. Where is he now?’” (46). After Piggy says that he doesn’t know where the little kid went everyone had to stop and think about how they all have no clue where he went because they were too focused on the fire. In addition, when Simon comes out of the forest even if everyone knew that it was him they did not care and still continued to beat him and very shortly after kill him. “The blue-white scar was constant, the noise unendurable. Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill”(152). They could hear him. See him, but never stopped because they we're so caught up in the moment to where they lost their feelings for everyone but