Lord Of The Flies Civilization Vs Savagery

In Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the children on the island go through a traumatic experience that no child should ever have to go through. After the children have been stranded on an island, eventually a Naval Officer comes to the island to save the stranded children. What the naval officer didn’t know was just what conflicts or events had occurred during the time they were on the island. The first thing the naval officer had seen when he got to the island was a ruffled up boy who was running in panic away from a group of boys who had face paint on and were carrying spears. By understanding how Jack transformed throughout the book, one can see that savagery took over the children like a plague as Jack was spreading it from person to person; furthermore it shows us that the main conflict of civilization versus savagery is one of the main questions that remains unanswered. One problem that developed was the growing loss of civilization as time went on. …show more content…
Jack in the beginning was content with Ralph taking charge but never really loved the idea of it; however as time went on, his views darkened. Jack’s view of getting saved disappeared completely after he realized that is wasn’t about getting saved, it was about making sure that he was in control and that he could always be the one to provide the kids with anything and everything that he made them think that they needed. He didn’t want to get saved, he cared more about survival than anything and he even went back to his primal, animal-like instincts. Even by the end of the story this conflict still showed itself by the end of the novel. Another issue is the unresolved conflict of Simon's death. That point seems to be the first dawn upon the loss of humanity in the group. Out of fear of the beast and lightning, Jack and the children start to do a dance that the group was convinced would keep them under protection from the beast. At this point in the novel, Simon was just waking up from a seizure and was returning back to camp with knowledge that the beast is not real and that it was just a figment that the kids had developed into many different things in their heads. In the heat of the moment, Simon returns just as all the kids are at their worst point in fear and they yell and accuse him of being the beast and they completely extinguish their only kindling flame of humanity in their own world by killing him. Although this conflict never gets spoken of again after Ralph and Piggy’s conversation about their loss of control over what they had done the night before, it is still an internal conflict that never gets resolved. Even with the officer who saved the kids, the kids themselves had problems that they had. The heart of all conflicts in the novel start and end with Jack being the main source of the savagery and disruption within the group. It all started with just having different minor opinions with what should be done on the island and leads all the way up to the deaths of key characters in the story such as Piggy who was killed by