Lord Of The Flies - Are People Essentially Good or Bad

In Lord of the Flies, Simon states “Maybe there is a beast... maybe it's only us.” An effective theme that Golding demonstrates throughout the book is whether people are essentially good or essentially bad. He creates this theme by involving the death of Simon, Ralph's adrenaline rush to hunting the boar for the first time, and the war that Jack had started with his tribe in order to kill Ralph at the very end of the novel. Golding includes these incidences to show us that people are essentially bad over the fact that people are essentially good. Simon was on his way back to the beach to tell the rest of the boys what the “beast” really was. Walking out of the forest the boys had noticed a dark figure that they had mistaken as the beast. They chanted “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!” With that, they took the weaponry that they had in their power to dismantle the beast for once and for all. Simon is crying out that he isn't the beast, but it never broke the war-cry scream that escaped the boys' mouths. The next morning, they had realized they had committed a murder. Even Ralph and Piggy, the wisest, most civilized out of the bunch, took part in the killing. They were in denial. They didn't want to believe that they had taken part in the killing of Simon. Ralph and Piggy, for as civilized as they are, still took part. They still had the nerve to kill a living thing, beast or no beast. The worst was brought out in them; the evil side of the boys. Ralph, who has never taken part in Jack's tribe's hunt, finally decided to try it out. In the heat of the moment, Ralph threw his spear at the boar. Afterward, Ralph was quite excited about the episode. He wonders excitedly toward Maurice “Didn't you see me?” Ralph only hit the boar in the nose, and he was still excited about it. If he would've actually killed it, imagine the way he would've felt. He was overjoyed by the fact that he was causing a living animal pain. Once again, the