The book Lord of the Flies was written back in 1954by the British Nobel Prize winner William Golding. This book describes the actions of a group of children, but it uses this childish point of view to reveal the true side buried deep in human nature.

The setting of the book is after a nuclear war; a plane accidentally brings a group of British boys to a beautiful island that’s isolated from the rest of the world. The twelve-year-old boy named Ralph plays the lead role of the boys from the beginning. He represents civilization, order, and rationality. The shell he uses for the right to speak symbolizes democracy and authority.

Everything seems peaceful and orderly at the beginning. Ralph led the boys to set fire for a rescue signal, set up tents for places to sleep, and hoped perhaps one day they could return home. But if one person claims to be the leader, there’s always another person who opposes. Jack, the hunter, is this person. He started to question Ralph’s leadership. Jack represents barbarous, animal instinct in humanity; he is the opposite of Ralph.

The rumors of a beast begin to circulate among the boys; everyone is scared. But a boy named Simon realized that the beast doesn’t actually exist. The beast and the fears of this beat only exist in the boys’ own hearts. Even though the boys later found out that the “beast” is just a pilot’s corpse, they don’t believe this, or they just don’t want to believe this. They already became dependent on fear. They felt scared but they don’t want the fear to disappear too, because this fear has already caused them to do too many things wayward of their original intention. If this fear disappears, they have to face their stupidity and cowardliness from the past.

Simon was like a medieval scientist who fought against religious superstitions and kept proclaiming the truth. But to the boys who are blinded by the craziness of fear, Simon became the “pagan”, and even the new source of fear, or the new “beast”. Simon’s death led the book to its climax. Simultaneously, it is also when the monster in the boys’ hearts gets out of control. In such an environment without civilization and rules, the bondage on the devil was gradually loosened. The boys joined Jack’s crowd one after another and chose a“freedom” built upon savagery.

The shift in this dynamic is further enhanced by the theft of fire from Ralph’s group by Jack’s, symbolizing the exchange in power from the fire of hope and civilization to the fire of violence and savagery. Furthermore, when the shell was broken into pieces, democracy is forever gone. And when Piggy’s eyeglasses were smashed, modern civilization is also gone.

At the end of the story, a ship saw the fire that was burning the whole island and found the boys. But all the boys, except Ralph, were all thoughtless savages now…

Overall, this book talks about the process of change from being moral to unscrupulous and from civilization to savagery. It shows that without boundaries, rules, and punishments, humans are not able to hide any dark side of our nature because all these orders or morals are built on top of absolute power and authority. So, after reading this book, my belief that a paradise of anarchism and utopia will be achieved became strengthened because they go against our human nature.

From Simon’s death, I realized that a crowd’s power is frightening because of its contagiousness. When a crowd is formed, the members will find their sense of identity and acceptance inside it and do many things that they would never do alone. As time passes, people became thoughtless or become like empty shells and be trapped in cages that they could never notice themselves. This shows me that Solitude is the most precious freedom.

​Lastly, I want to say that Lord of the Flies also reminds me of the book Animal Farm. They both use the topic of children as a coat to reveal the real side deep in human nature and of the world.