Lord of the Flies: The Meaning of the Beast

The book Coral Island was written about a group of boys who get stranded on an island and are forced to work together in order to survive. The boys have to face an evil that is externalized in cannibals that live on the island hunting them. When William Golding read this he criticized the book for its unrealistic view of how humans act and react in a situation like Coral Island, in response he wrote Lord of the Flies. Golding peered deep into the human mind and discovered that humans do not always work together for the good of society and saw the chaos and lawlessness humans are born with but overcome with rationality. In Lord of the Flies Golding’s characters first show signs of being civilized humans but as their instinct to survive takes over and a group of hunters, lead by Jack, breaks off from the original established center of ideas, lead by Ralph. Stories begin to surface of a beast in the forest and the hunters use violence and hard attitudes to guard against their fear ...