Lord of the Flies

Themes in the text

There are multiple themes in the Nobel Prize winning novel the Lord of the flies written by William Golding in the year 1955. The novel attempts to bring to light the evil that is inherent in the human nature. A good society is the consequence of the ethical conduct of the human society and not the political system that governs the human society (Vygotskii, p. 114).

The form of the text is symbolic and the only human intervention is towards the end of the novel where a naval officer comes to the rescue of the children entrapped in the otherwise deserted island. The life of the children and their conduct on the island symbolizes the true nature of the society. What makes a person ethical is the moral integrity that is present in some form in each one of us. What we need is to work on getting this moral side to dominate the immoral and evil side of our being.

Another important theme in this novel is that fact that sometimes a society outcasts a certain individual and community for no reason at all. The underlying objective of this exclusion of the social party is personal gratification (Vygotskii, p. 115). Through this, people feed the evil inside them by making fun of those stereotyped by the larger society. The character of Piggy demonstrates this theme in the novel.

To demonstrate the presence of both good and evil, the author constructed two contradictory characters, those of Ralph and Jack. Ralph is a person who cannot take violence and resolves against it. On the other hand, Jack is obsessed with violence. When Jack first killed

“His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling ...