Seven Deadly Sins In Lord Of The Flies Essay

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Lord of the flies by William Golding is a novel depicting the savage nature of a group of boys stranded on an island. The boys begin innocently enough, but are soon corrupted by “mankind’s essential illness” (Golding 69). The novel makes many biblical references including: Beelzebub, Jesus and the seven deadly sins that are used to convey a message about this illness. It was the sins represented in each character, the boy’s loss of innocence, and the failing of Jesus caused the illness to infect their little paradise.

Each boy or group represents one, two or three sins. Ralph, Lord of the flies (Beelzebub) and Jack represent pride, because they have an inflated sense of self worth. Both Jack and Ralph demand to be called “chief”. They make
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It started when the boys became more interested in the joy of killing, rather than the meat from killing. The boys second kill takes a dark turn when Jack says “”Look.” He giggled and flinked them while the boys laughed at his reeking palms” (Golding 149), they then proceed to paint themselves and participate in savagery. We are not born evil, we learn it, when Jack felt his pride was hurt because he was not chief he resorted to leading hunting trips. The hunting gave him power and that opened the gates to his sinning and the rest of the groups sinning too. They started to ignore the fire and focus on their own selfish desires, rather than focus on their rescue. Not all the sins were intentional. Some, like the littluns laziness or Samneric's sloth are innocent, but they still provoked problems.

The boys in the novel landed on a beautiful island, and it was there own human nature that caused their demise. Golding used the biblical references mentioned above to show mankind’s essential illness. This sickness that plagues mankind is man's natural ability to cause problems for themselves. They could not help it, according to Golding anyone can fall victim to their own intuition. Anyone, even an innocent group of young boys can be consumed by mankind’s instinct to conceive their own

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