Childhood Elements in the Lord of the Flies
Childhood Elements in the Lord of the Flies
Picture this… you are flipping through the radio and finally stop the mindless button pushing and stop to hum to that loveable tune you have grown to love. “Girls just wanna have fun..yeah yeah,” but have you ever once stopped to think about it? It seems to me that it must be changed to something more general. When it all comes down to it, we all just “wanna have fun.” Golding demonstrates this in Lord of the Flies when young boys are stranded on an island by themselves and all Hell breaks loose. Time and time again I have looked around me and seen humans wrecking something that once was gorgeous. My point being that we take something that was once a beautiful paradise and transform it into an ugly battlefield of shenanigans.
An ugly battlefield of shenanigans you are thinking? Let me prove my point. We have grown up day-to-day in a government that most of us see as ideal. I would certainly think that these ideas would not stick to these young children’s brains, but that is not the case. In fact, these “rules” of society actually stuck to their backs like a back against a leather seat on a muggy summer day. The children end up running amuck on the island getting caught up in the mumbo jumbo of having no rules. However, throughout all the fun they are having they still feel some sort of guilt on their shoulders when they do something “bad.” For example, when Maurice smashes Percival’s sandcastle, sand gets in Percival’s eyes. Maurice feels miserable even when there is not anyone there to give him a stern lecture on how, “You could poke his eye out, kid.” This is all apparent on page 65. It states, “Percival began to whimper with an eyeful of sand and Maurice hurried away. In his other life, Maurice had received chastisement for filling a younger eye with sand. Now, though there was no parent to let fall a heavy hand, Maurice still felt unease of wrong doing.” Now that is a powerful government, don’t you think? Even after a few weeks of being away from home, the children still keep the laws of their old home close by.
I know that if I had been without reading of Lord of the Flies I would most...