Lord of the Flies :: essays research papers

The Lord of the Flies is about a mini-society of boys formed by chance. Their isolation from adults forced reality upon them and so they had to think for themselves and work together. As a commentary of today's society it does well to explain some of today's issues like violence, laws, pride, greed, fear, religious power and the conflict between living in a civilised society or savagery. It is all about the choice the boys made when life became real. In the beginning their lives were controlled and protected by their parents, teachers and police officers. Jack cannot kill the pig even though he can eat meat because of the "enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh." (p 41). Roger cannot hit the boys with the stones even though he could if he wanted to because he has been conditioned by the society he used to live in. This is the type of society the children live in. Everything is a game until the beast. The beast signals the end of the games and start of reality. Lives are at stake in perspective of the boys and survival must occur in any form. Our society is much like this as today's society is also about survival and what choices we make to survive. The mini-society started off peaceful. The purpose was to set a signal fire and live off fruit until help came. The conflict came when the fire and hunting could not be committed to at the same time. As the fire was a 24 hour task and hunting needed the whole party, the party started to take sides. Ralph's fire would be the sensible thing to do to get rescued however hunting would lift the standard of living for all the boys and would also be a luxury, recreational event. The fire was hard work and immediate results were none even though long-term results would be better. The hunting side wins eventually. In Australia today we are spending beyond our ability to afford this spending. This means we have a great influx of goods and services but as a community we are cheating ourselves as this leads to a current account deficit and the cost of living in this deficit must be paid plus the deficit. In this book's case, the deficit was their morals and the interest was paid in life.