The boys chant, “Kill the beast, cut his throat spill his blood!” in chapter 9, while they horrifically murder Simon because they believe him to the beast. Golding never properly explains what exactly the beast is, though his heavy use of symbolism can give many clues. Whatever the beast is, it’s horrible enough to drive the boys to murder. Throughout Lord of the Flies, the beast takes many forms: it begins as fear, then morphs into war, which then combine to demonstrate the savagery of human nature. Fear controls the boys. At night, the littluns wake up screaming from night terrors. The older boys become more and more skittish during the day. Gradually, their fear consumes them. This general fear is universally personified as a beast (document A). The boy with the birthmark brought up the idea of a beast that was “ever so big” and “turned into them things like ropes in the trees and hung in the branches” during the day (document B). Their fears are not helped by Jack, who tries to reassure them that if there was a beast, they would hunt and kill it. Although what Jack is saying …show more content…
At one point, a dead pilot lands on the island, which the boys (specifically SamnEric) mistake for the beast they already feared (document D). At this point in the story, the beast begins to represent war. This new “beast” came after Ralph wished for a sign from the grownup world in chapter 6. It symbolizes that even the adults can’t help them, quite possibly because they are no better. As stated earlier, everything the boys do is influenced by their perception of the existence of a beast. When Golding writes the beast to represent war, the boys actions are related to war (document C). This first shift in the meaning of the beast occurs as the boys are beginning to divide, as Jack begins to undermine Ralph. The beast symbolizes war; the boys are consumed by the beast, and the boys are eventually consumed by
The relationship between the beast and the school boys is played out through the conversation between Simon and the Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Flies or pig head tries to intimidate and forewarn Simon calling him,”just an ignorant, silly little boy”(184) and scoffs at Simon for thinking the beast is “something you could hunt or kill!” (184) Golding uses this symbolic beast, the Lord of the Flies, to reveal the truth to Simon which is that “they”(184) the boys on the island are the real beast. Before Simon faints the Lord of the Flies warms Simon that
The beast is important, because it is a universal personification of the fear that ensnares most of the boys on the island. The strong belief in the beast allows Jack to take control. Furthermore, the fear of the beast scares Ralph to such a degree that he calls a meeting to vote on whether the beast is real or not. The book points to clear evidence of this: “Maybe, ...there is a beast, I don’t know, what I mean, maybe it's only us,” (Golding 84). This quote shows that Simon wasn’t terrified of the beast like the others as a living, breathing monster. Simon fears that the boys are becoming the beast by their actions on the
No one would think kids could turn to cruelty, but in this book, you can see how human nature turns people against each other. Not all the boys turned to savages, but there were times when there actions were questionable. Take Ralph for example, he was probably one of the least barbaric of them all, yet he still joined in on the murder of Simon. While most boys were oblivious to their descent into savagery, people like Ralph realized this ongoing turn, “I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home, Oh God, I want to go home” (Golding 157). The boys change into savagery was not gradual, and even some of the boys, such as Ralph or Simon, noticed this trend, and as young boys it frightened them to realize the fact that they were altering towards inhumanity. As well, the book represents that evil is in all of us. The Beast, which was the main source of evil in the book, was not real. It was only a figment of the boys’ imaginations. While the Beast wasn’t a physical thing it represented
After arriving back from his first hunting trip, Jack unknowingly admits his fear of an inner dark side to Ralph as he tells him that “If you’re hunting sometimes...you can feel as if you’re not hunting, but-- being hunted…”(53). Jack is afraid of being hunted, which is ironically what he wants to do. Although he may not realize it, Jack is afraid of his inner darkness; he’s afraid that his obsession with hunting will turn him savage. Even so, as he continues to pursue his mania, he causes conflict amongst their society. The majority of the boys side with him over Ralph in their battle for power, showing that in times of fear, people will behave irrationally because they have lost clarity and go to desperate and violent measures to cope with their fears. As the hunters, Ralph, and Simon search the island for the beast, Simon envisions the beast as “the picture of a human at once heroic and sick” (103). Simon is the least beast-like out of all the boys, yet he is the only one to completely understand the mysterious beast. The fact that the boys know that they could kill a monster, if needed, comforts them because they’re making the beast into something they want it to be. The boys don’t want to accept that the beast is something within them because they don’t know how to deal with it. An inevitable, nefarious nature is much harder to avoid or defeat than a palpable monster. If a society is frightened of
Firstly, the beast represents the irrational fear that exists within humans. People have irrational fears toward multiple things, such as the Loch Ness Monster or the Boogey Man. In Lord of the Flies, the boys developed a fear of the unknown. “The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly … ‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in’” (Golding 168). As time passed and the concept of the beast grew and the boys lost more and more of their will and hope. As a result, they turned to
In the final analysis of the Lord of the Flies it is really the children who demonstrate who the beast is. They first to on the presence of overwhelming fear, which eventually becomes that of war and lastly the savage nation of mankind. Because these boys were left alone with no one to “ dispel the terrors of the unknown” it eventually lead to the true understanding of the
What is the beast? In Lord of the Flies, there is a bunch of kids that landed on an island during the war. These kids try to act and do things like adults would. They voted for a leader and that was Ralph. They also had a conch that symbolized who was allowed to talk when they had something to say.
What do you picture in your mind when someone mentions a beast? Fangs? Claws? That is what the castaways believe the beast to look like on the island in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The story follows several school boys who have crashed onto an exotic island. They elect a leader, Ralph, and they break up into groups: the hunters, the “littluns”, and the hut builders. Soon the “littluns" become frightened of a beast that no one has seen, and it becomes an obsession of the islanders. They interpret the beast in many ways, saying it comes from the water, the sky, and one of the boys even suggested that the beast was themselves. So, what is the beast? The beast could be a representation of war, fear, or human savagery.
In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Golding utilizes the idea of a beast as a symbol to articulate the human impulse towards savagery. Golding foreshadows how the beast does not exist when Simon says “Maybe, maybe there is a beast … what I mean is … maybe it’s only us” (89). The quote reveals that the beast does not physically exist. Simon’s words show that the beast is just a personification of the primal instinct toward cruelty inlaid in humanity. Towards the end of the book, the boys seem identical to brutes that drop their spears and “ screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws” (153). Samneric’s description of the beast at the start of the book
Further blinded by the illusion that their supposedly superior English heritage precludes savagery, the boys ignore the perverse qualities of their actions. Nevertheless, they become terrified as they increasingly feel the blight of their own evil upon the island. Attempting to attribute the decay of sanity and civilization to external sources, they fail to look inwards. When Simon correctly proposes that the beast is "maybe. . . only [themselves]" (89), the others scornfully dismiss him as "batty" (52) and his suggestion as invalid; they refuse to acknowledge Simon because they are neither capable nor willing to believe the frightening truth that the evil arises from within themselves. As a result, the boys manifest their fear in a dead parachutist whose appearance they grotesquely distort. Ironically, this source of fear comes from the majestic adult world to which they have so long
The beast acts as a symbol for the group’s horror when Sam and Eric think they see the beast and, “Then as though they had one terrified mind between them they scrambled away over the rocks and fled.” (107) The beast, truly being a made up creature brought to life through the fear of the group, make the group extra sensitive when anything is out of the ordinary. The thought of the beast not only conjures up fear, it brings in a sense of uncertainty. Through the alternating beliefs of the beast being real, the boys are left thinking, “I mean when Jack says you can be frightened because people are frightened anyway that’s all right.
Towards the beginning of the book, most of the boys find it unimaginable that there might be a beast living on the island. However, most of the younger boys and even the hunters begin to believe this idea after Phil says, “Then I saw something moving among the trees, something big and horrid” (85). Simon, the most natural and moral boy in the group, tells the boys that the beast may live within each of them rather than with them on the island. The boys seem to laugh at his different opinion and fall into the fear of the beast. The idea of the beast consumes most of the boys
The beast is a concept, which represents an irrational fear within the boys themselves. The beast is just the savagery in them. Every person has evil in them. The Lord of the Flies told Simon “ Fancy thinking the beast was actually something you could hunt and kill! … You knew didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, Close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”(Golding 143) through the boars head. Overall the beast represents the devil. I think that it’s just a power that takes over peoples the boys feelings, which caused chaos and barbaric actions within the boys.
The significance of this part of the novel is that, the boys are so focused on the beast; they do not realize or plan much regarding what to do, and harm each other without much empathy. Hence, in the novel Lord of the Flies, fear of the unknown is greatly stressed and
The boy’s psychological fears terrorize them, causing them to become violent to each other. When the plane crashes, it is implied that for the first time in their lives, the boys are alone and afraid. They do not understand the internal fear and they project it into a physical fear, the beast. This is vocalised early on as Piggy translates for a littlun,”’ Now he says it was a beastie.’ ‘Beastie?’ ‘ A snake-thing. Ever so big.He saw it” (34). This idea becomes rooted into the other boys and they develop a built-up fear of this ‘beast’ that takes on multiple figures as the novel progresses. Consequently, causing a threat to their own survival as they murder Simon thinking he was the so called ‘beast’. Golding writes, “ At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There was no words, and no movements but the