Jane-Frances Ndukwu Ms
Jane-Frances Ndukwu
Ms. Monte
9 CP English (5)
19 April 2018
“The end of innocence”
Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a fictional novel about a group of British schoolboys that find themselves without any adult supervision on an island after their plane got shot down over the Pacific because of the unknown war going during that time. A group of British schoolboys are stranded on a tropical island, and in an attempt to keep the civilization, they elect Ralph to lead, with Piggy as the counselor because he is smart. But Jack also wants to lead and one-by-one, he lures the boys from civility to savagery and at the end, they all get rescued but lose two people.
In the novel Lord of the flies, when the boys are taken away from the influence of society they lose their innocence and begin to depend on darker, and more primitive ways to achieve power such as murder.
Therefore, when individuals that are inexperienced and uneducated are torn from civilization and forced to be self-sufficient; then the individuals undergo moral and behavioral change.
The first way the boys change is by becoming rude, violent, mean,e.t.c. while Jack was getting yelled at for letting the fire go out, piggy started talking. Since Jack doesn’t like Piggy, he hit him in the face: “Ralph made a step forward and Jack smacked piggy’s face. piggy’s glasses flew off and twinkled on the rocks” (71). As a result, piggy’s glasses broke and Jack doesn’t apologize. Since the boys argue and fight, they are losing their childlike innocence.
Next, they start to kill each other. During the chant, they thought Simon was the beast, so they start to stab him. The scene is described as, at once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leaped on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. They were very violent because they bit Simon. Since some of the boys didn’t feel guilty, they again lost their innocence.
Finally, I think they suffered the loss of innocence in very drastic ways; therefore, they can’t regain their innocence after seeing such horrible things. Some of them like Jack and his hunters might go to prison because of the bad things they did.
