Lord of the Flies is mostly about fear
Lord of the Flies is mostly about fear. The boys shows a lot of fear in many things throughout the book. They see and hear things on the island and assume that it’s some type of beasts or creatures around. After disorder on the island, a group of hunters offer a gift to the much sought after and feared beast. A boy that is not with the group of hunters, encountered their gift to the feared beast and he had talked to it to learn the causes of the evil on the island.
The author William Golding’s was born on September 19, 1911 in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall. He was the younger son of Alec and Mildred Golding. His father, that came from a working-class Quaker family near Bristol, was a science teacher at Marlborough Grammar School. Golding and his brother, Jose, attended this school and grew up in Wiltshire. Strongly influenced by his father, he enrolled at Brasenose College, Oxford, to study natural science. But after two discontented years, eager to escape “the labs where the frogs twitched and the rabbits’ guts swelled in the hot summer humidity”, he switched to English and became especially fascinated by Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The tone of Lord of the Flies is fairly aloof, creating a sense of removal from the events. The boys on the island generally treat each other with a lack of sympathy, and, similarly, the overall tone of the book expresses neither shock nor sympathy toward what happens. Events such as the deaths of Simon and Piggy are related in matter-of-fact detail: “Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened, and stuff came out and turned red.” The tone here is resigned, expressing no surprise at the violent death of one of the main characters. The sense is that the deaths are as inevitable as the tide: “Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.” By focusing on the natural world in the immediate aftermath of the death, instead of the boys, Golding distances the reader from the emotion of the scene, but his precise details about what Piggy’s broken body looks like impart a sense of horror and disgust.
Throughout the novel, Golding’s tone suggests the island itself is as responsible for what happens as the boys. Golding’s tone when describing nature is anxious and distrustful. He personifies nature as a violent, vengeful force. The heat becomes “a blow that (the boys) ducked.” The trees rub together “with an evil speaking.” The tide is a “sleeping leviathan” and the sea boils “with a roar.” Clouds “squeezed, produced moment by moment this close, tormenting heat.” Evening comes, “not with calm beauty but with the threat of violence.” The boys are presented as almost as vulnerable to the forces of nature as to each other, sustaining the tone of justified fear. Nature is a destructive force that elicits the boys’ most savage natures. Their growing discomfort and unease with the effects of nature, as expressed by Ralph’s disgust at his filthy clothes, overgrown hair, and unbrushed teeth, heighten the tone of anxiety.
In the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy, discover a conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn to summon the other boys. Once assembled, the boys set about electing a leader and devising a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints another boy, Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for the entire group.
Ralph, Jack, and Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to death.
In Lord of the Flies there are many conflicts, but the major conflict is Ralph vs. Jack. This conflict helps out the story by adding drama; also the story is a little bit about Jack and Ralph, and who will survive between the two. The boys had no idea that this tension that was made between Ralph and Jack would end in such tragedy, and take lives. How this conflict started was by when the boys assembled on the beach. In the election for leader, Ralph defeats Jack, who is furious when he loses. As the boys explore the island, tension grows between Jack, who is interested only in hunting, and Ralph, who believes most of the boys’ efforts, should go toward building shelters and maintaining a signal fire. When rumors surface that there is some sort of beast living on the island, the boys grow fearful, and the group begins to divide into two camps supporting Ralph and Jack. Jack forms a new tribe altogether, fully immersing himself in the savagery of the hunt.
It is obvious from the first time that Ralph and Jack meet that there will be a struggle between them. In chapter one when the two meet Jack automatically proclaims himself the leader while Ralph has himself in mind for the position (freeessay.com). Another conflict in this story is the boys vs. nature. The boys must struggle to stay alive, and struggle against an imaginary beast, which is from fear imbedded in part of their nature (www.123helpme.com). One thing that causes Ralph and Jack to have tension between each other is their difference in what they believe in. Ralph says they should keep order, and keep the fire burning, and start to build shelter. Jack on the other hand thinks differently, Jack sees this island as a game and becomes obsessed with hunting.
