Innocence In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

"As exciting, relevant and thought-provoking now as it was when Golding published it in 1954". - Stephen King
That moment when you see the world a little bit clearer but you're a sadder and wiser person for the knowledge that you've gained. Moreover, you can never go back to the innocence of not knowing what you've learned. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies a group of school boys aged six to twelve, are evacuated from England where an atomic war is raging. The plane carrying the boys is shot down, crash landing onto an uninhabited tropical island leaving a massive "scar" in the once pristine wilderness.
"Do not envy a man of violence and do not choose any of his ways." - Proverbs 3:31
This foreshadows the devastation that the boys' transformation
We spend most of our days either committing acts of violence or recoiling from them; hatred surges through our undeveloped bodies like an electric current. The innocence of the child and of man is a fallacy; by nature man has a terrible potentiality for evil and sinfulness. The children's community is in fact a microcosm of the adult world. Golding has chosen to isolate his children on an island and has deliberately magnified the problems and issues at stake. Golding himself has said that the cause is nothing more than the inherent evil of man. Man will never be able to permanently contain the beast within. The fire which they try to keep going on the top of the mountain is the symbol of their attachment to civilization for it embodies their hope for rescue. The boys were sick with power and evil, much like the world outside of the
How they begin to view things and each other as well as their loss of sanity towards the end is what truly helps complete the overall story. For the hunters, the deification of the Lord of the Flies becomes the head of a pig covered in flies, which Jack puts up on a stick to placate an illusory Beast. It symbolizes the infinite cynicism of adult life. As Simon understands, the only dangerous Beast, the true Lord of the Flies; is inside the children themselves. The dead parachutist is also the beast to the children. A symbol of the adult evil which by their own act of killing they've shown to be a part of themselves. The island, the sea and the sacrifice of Simon all show Ralph the truth of the human situation. For him the sea typifies the insensitivity of the universe. The horror of their rituals stress the fact that the children have fallen into a state of savagery in which evil is all powerful. Ralph faces the possibility that there's no absolute perspective to human life and that all experiences may be