Lord Of The Flies Conch Analysis

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a frightening tale displaying the collapse of civilization and government due to man’s innate preferences towards savagery and anarchy. The novel follows a group of young British schoolboys who are stranded on an island. In pure isolation from the outside world, the boys, with nothing but mankind’s true nature, slowly digress from civilized humans into primitive beasts. Throughout the story, the conch and its loss of influence over the island directly exhibits the group’s descent into barbaric and malice behavior. It is through this relationship that Golding established the conch motif as a symbol of law and order, suggesting without it’s presence, mankind loses all constraints and ties to civilization and will ultimately succumb to man’s true nature.
Golding first introduced the existence …show more content…
In an effort to retrieve Piggy’s glasses, Piggy, Ralph, and SamnEric head to Castle Rock with the conch. Despite Ralph holding the conch, Jack sees no reason to return Piggy’s specs. This represents Jack’s complete defiance against the laws, a defiance that has spread to the rest of the boys. As a result, the boy’s demonstrated their complete transition into savagery by unmercilessly murdering Piggy, along with “the conch [that] exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.” With the destruction of the conch, law and order is therefore eliminated from the island. Allowing savagery to reign as displayed when Jack announced himself as chief. With the last traces of civilization destroyed, the boy have descended into complete savagery and hunt Ralph. The huge contrast between the boy’s behavior at the start of their adventure to the sickening bloodlust towards the end clearly identifies the loss of order and importance of laws as a driving factor behind man’s transformation to their savage