The Lord of the Flies Analytical

Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Golding that is about a group of boys that have crash landed on a deserted island with no adults around them. This novel is allegorical and so it contains many symbols that have deeper meanings than what they first seem to be. One of these symbols is fire. At first every boy on the island wants to have a fire because it means that someone might see their smoke and come to rescue them from the island. As the novel progress you can see that the boys no longer believe that they will be rescued and don’t really care if they are rescued or not. Instead these boys revert back to their savage and primitive ways.

            At the beginning of the novel the boys on the island met up and have a meeting. At this meeting they decide on how things on the island should be run and what should occur how. Ralph brings up the idea of making a fire and says, “If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire.” When Ralph says this all the other boys agree with him and get excited about making a fire and in turn the possibility of being rescued and going home. At this point in the novel, every single boy is thinking about, and hoping to be rescued. This is the most important thing to them.

            The thoughts of being rescued and going home are not long-lived for all the boys. Jack and his hunters, whom he is in charge of, are in charge of keeping the fire constantly going on top of the mountain and they also want to hunt and kill a pig. Jack believes that killing a pig is more important than keeping the fire going. Because he thinks that, Jack leaves the fire unattended and takes his boys to go paint their faces to hunt and kill their first pig. While they do this, the fire dies and a ship happens to pass by the island. Ralph sees the ship and is extremely excited at the thought that they may finally be rescued, but then finds out that their fire had gone out. He was furious with Jack but Jack didn’t care about the ship or being rescued because he had killed his first pig. Here, you can see how Jack’s objectives have changed. He no longer wants to build and maintain a fire so he can be rescued and return to civilization. Jack would rather do more savage things like paint his face and kill a pig.

            The rest of the boys on the island begin to follow Jack’s lead. Slowly, the boys begin to lose sight of why they want a fire in the first place. Ralph, the boy who first realized that importance of the fire forgets too. When Jack breaks off into his own tribe, only Piggy, Ralph, and SamnEric and some “littluns” who can’t do much are left in Ralph’s tribe. SamnEric are supposed to be tending to the fire but they really do not want to and are tired. They say to Ralph and Piggy, “What is the good? Ralph tried indignantly to remember. There was something good about a fire. Something overwhelmingly good.” Piggy eventually reminded him, “How else are we going to be rescued?” This sequence of events shows how even the ones that want to return to civilization the most, can forget why they need a fire. The boys on the island have too many other things to think about and instead of banding together to be able to be rescued, the boys became savages that are only worried about the drama on the island.

            By the end of the book, the boys have given up all hope of rescue.  In the end of book, all of the boys that are still alive are apart of Jack’s tribe, except for Ralph. Due to Jack’s incomprehendable hatred of Ralph, Jack’s tribe hunts down and tries to hill Ralph. When Jack’s tribe has difficulity getting to Ralph to kill him, they set fire to the entire island in hopes of smoking Ralph out into the open. By doing this Jack set fire to the only thing that the boys had left, the place they live on. This shows how Jack no longer cares about preserving the island to live on until they are rescued because Jack does not think about rescue at all. He is so absorbed in trying to murder another child and leading his tribe. He is no longer a child but a primitive person that acts savagely towards other human beings.

            As Lord of the Flies progress you watch as innocent young boys become completely different people. They had once been boys excited for adventure while constantly wishing and hoping for rescue. As they continued to live on the island, that state of mind deteriorated into the boys becoming savages who thought that the right way to deal with disagreements was to kill each other. You can see this deterioration by following the use of fire throughout the novel.