The major theme of Lord of the flies

The novel, ‘Lord of the flies’ by Golding descries the savagery behaviors of young British children survived from a plane crash in an isolated unmanned island. What Golding is trying to reveal to us in this novel is the faulty but true human nature or characteristic, which could be very cruel and destructive, or lazy, ignorant and incompetent at the best. The major theme of this novel is that our animal-like brutal nature is hidden barely below the ethical or legal restrictions of our society, and that our beast could erupt anytime into violence or wars when the subtle equilibrium of our society is impaired.

Last year when I was in Toronto, I read the novel, ‘The chocolate war’ written by Robert Cormier, which was among the highly recommended books. At that time, I could not quite understand why I should read such a terrible story. This year, I was told to read two other miserable novels; 1984 by George Orwell and this one. The reason that these novels about dystopia are recommended and that this kind of themes is important to us is, I believe, because teenagers should be prepared to confront the real world. The utopia like ‘Coral island’ does not exist. It is nothing but illusion – not because of other bad peoples around us or the unfair society, but because of the inherently faulty human nature of all of us.

The innocent looking bird needs to kill insects to survive, but the insect would consider the bird as an evil.