Lord of the Flies: Theme Analysis - Essay Example

No Hope for Mankind Through Lord of the Flies Golding reveals man’s basic nature, his savage nature. It is the social control which keeps him a bitcivilized. In order to show what happens if the control is stripped, Golding puts a few children in an isolated place, an island, where they are given absolute freedom to have their own ways to survive. Each boy has a particular quality, like leadership, intelligence, or spirituality, but lacks in other qualities. Among these children, all below their teen age, it is Jack who represents the real human nature, with his greed for power.

Finally the novelist shows in Lord of the Flies that neither the intelligence of Piggy nor the intuition of Simon along with the leadership qualities of Ralph, the savage instinct of Jack cannot be kept under check to save the island from total ruin, a miniature space standing for the entire planet. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence”, says the narrator (Golding, 200), hinting that there is no hope for mankind as the savage instinct outweighs all other strong faculties of man. The fall of the boys is contrasted to the human drama that goes on in the background, the nuclear war.

The only hint about it at the beginning is that the boys were ejected from a burning plane on an island in the Pacific. At the end of the novel, when Jack sets the island in flames, a ship arrives to rescue the boys. Ironically, the novelist shows that this ship too was committed to destruction in the atomic war, revealing the fact that the adult world is only more sophisticated in savagery than the boys. Like the British officer, the reader helplessly feels that the boys (man) “would have been able to put up a better show” (200).

It is a realistic novel in which the boys with their diverse nature represent the hard reality in this world, though the absence of a female character cannot go unnoticed. Reference Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. http://zbths.org/165310818145034323/lib/165310818145034323/_files/LOTF.pdf Retrieved on 6 March 2011.