William Golding's Lord Of The Flies Essay

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“Civilization sails prettily like a child’s rubber balloon until it hits a sharp object; then it is likely to collapse like the balloon.” -Austin O’Malley. Lord of the Flies, a realistic fiction novel by William Golding, tells the tale of a group of boys, stranded on an island after a plane crash, trying to form their own functioning civilization until they are rescued. Golding’s use of symbolism gives each character their own unique and hidden representation of good or evil personalities. Jack, the antagonist, represents the downfall of a society or civilization because of his savage personality traits, subsidence of morals, and his deteriorating state of mind. Jack’s power-hungry and aggressive personality represents the factors that…show more content…
Throughout the book, the circumstances the boys are in allow us to witness Jack’s progressive mind decadence. This deterioration is an allegory for the slow and painful-to-watch fall of the boys’ tiny civilization. As the plot unfolds before us, Jack’s mental stability comes into question a few times. The slow process of the island and its circumstances are slowly driving him towards insanity and demolition. At the beginning of the book, everything is fine with the civilization and with Jack. “Jack held out his hands for the conch and stood up, holding the delicate thing carefully in his sooty hands.” (p.42). Jack played by the rules in the beginning. He begins to further test his limits until he eventually breaks from his sanity. When Jack’s sanity is completely gone, so is the civilization they worked so hard to maintain. After Jack has had enough, he breaks apart from the group and forms his own civilization. Two civilizations with different morals leads to death, loss of innocence, and a lifetime of
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