Discuss Golding

’s View Of Human Nature As Expresse Essay, Research Paper

The whole novel “Lord of the Flies” is about how William Golding sees human nature and how society struggles to survive. Golding criticises all the aspects of mankind and shows how defective we are. Golding creates a microworld to analyse human nature in the macroworld, which is the world that we live in. According to the Bible, in the beginning of life there were Adam and Eve, who were in paradise and Golding uses the same situation to study human nature. He put a group of boys in an Island, which initially was a paradise. But why didn’t Golding include girls in his novel? This is a good question and I think that maybe he knew that the female nature is totally different from the male nature and he could never analyse them together or maybe because he was a man and he knew best his own nature. Or just maybe because at the time he wrote his book, women had no chance to do any job or to be in power therefore he decided to talk about only men, because he thought that women had no importance on society. Who knows ? Golding shows that man’s need for civilisation is vital. Everybody says that the society is evil and unfair, but with this novel it became clear enough to me to understand that we are the ones who make society. The story also shows that law, rules and leadership are strongly necessary to keep the dark side of human nature hidden. And when any part of society fails or is ignored, we see our more primitive instincts taking power. For example, in the book when the boys start to disobey the rules we see the chaos that is brought to their society. Leadership is one of the aspects of society that Golding also discusses in his novel. Leaders are very important to keep laws and rules being obeyed and also leaders are very important to give the example of the expected code of behaviour. In the book, Ralph is voted to be the boys’ leaders. Even that Jack appeared to be a natural leader, the boys voted to Ralph because he had the conch, which was a strong symbol of power and which was given to Ralph by Piggy. In only this part of the novel, Golding said a lot about leadership and later on he showed that it exists various types of power. Ralph is similar to what we know in the macroworld as a democratic leader. His public chose him, he listens to the others and take into account their opinion. Democratic power is showed when choices and decisions are shared among many. Piggy is associated with a kind of prime minister or the “brain” behind Ralph, all the ideas come from Piggy; Ralph doesn’t think by his own and he knows that. When Jack become the “chief”, we can see the different between the two leaders. Jack can be associated with a kind of dictator, and this alters the type of power that he uses to rule from the type of power that Ralph uses. Jack uses an authoritarian power, which allows him to rule by threatening and terrifying the others. And Roger, one of the most primitive boy, uses brutal force to make the others have fear from him. It might sounds strange, but Simon has a spiritual power, which made him more sensitive to internal and external realities, but no one listened to him. And the ignorance of a society killed a boy who carried with him the truth about the beast.

One thing that all the English teachers that I have during these last 3 months said to me was to pay attention to the lost of innocence during the book. When the boys first arrived on the island, they were just “innocent” boys but in the end of the book it was hard to remember that they were just boys in an island. Someone said “the existence of civilisation allows man to remain innocent or ignorant about his true nature” although we need civilisations, we have to be aware of our more primitive instincts. I think Golding tries to say that maturity is related to a person’s understanding of human nature and there is not to do with its age. The disrespect within the environment is notable in all the book. The boys started rolling rocks, cutting trees, burning almost half of the island and etc. Destruction is seem in almost every act of the boys in the island. Far away from society, the boys started to lost their identity and become in real savages. What also simbolyses this act of loosing identity of being civilisated are the masks that Jack’s group wear. But in my opinion is the opposite: we are savages and the society is like a mask that we wear to hide our primordial instincts. Is it a pessimistic point of view of human nature? I don’t think so. I think that Golding gave his opinion about what we are and if we have lots of defects, it doesn’t mean that he was pessimistic, but he was just realistic. We are the only animal in the earth that kills our same specie for any specific reason, not for feed ourselves and not for protecting our territory, sometimes just for pleasure. And there are still some people who call us “rational”. It’s also true that Golding focus on including most the bad side of human nature than its good side, but he made that to criticise the human nature and maybe with the idea of changing something in the posterior generations. The way that he finished his book was very clever. We saw that the man who came to save the boys was not a “soldier of the peace”, on the contraire, he was a soldier that was in a war. With this situation, Golding finds a way to link both words. The war of the microworld has a continuation with the war of the macroworld, therefore the war has not finished. And Golding also concludes his book, giving the message that we are those boys. All of us. Who can’t image being one of those boys in that island? It’s in human nature; there is nothing we can do. One day, I was watching on the TV “Star Trek” and there was a whole nation of robots that had been conquering thousands of worlds just to obtain the stage of perfection. And they were almost destroying the entire human race but at the last moment they didn’t know the power that love has and that was our triumph. Love is something that we have well in human nature, and maybe one day it can prevail our evil side.

36b