Anger In Lord Of The Flies Essay

“Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.”(Aristotle). Anger, is normal, however, it is the cause of a notable amount of negative actions in society, as shown by Jack Merridew in the Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris the article “Columbine High School Shooting”. Anger can gradually cause people to change and completely shift into totally different characters and perform actions that normally would not be carried out by this person. Anger starts out as a small emotion that doesn’t have an extreme effect on people at first. In the Lord of The Flies, when the boys first crashed on the island, they had a vote to see who would become their leader. One of the two candidates, Jack Merridew, did not get elected. His initial anger and embarrassment is shown when his “face disappeared under a …show more content…
In the beginning of the Lord of The Flies, it would have been very unexpected for Jack to quickly become someone so savage, as he couldn’t even manage to kill a piglet while hunting. This anger causes him to feel as if he needs to redeem himself, as he feels angry about not being the leader and wants to prove himself by being a hunter within their group. In the case of the Columbine shooting, the two teens started to show their anger by developing interests such as Nazism and white supremacy. Their idolization of Adolf Hitler was clear as they had planned their attack to be on the 110th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth. Since these interests developed a few months before the shootings, it shows the gradual progression of anger overpowering them. Again, these two cases show Golding’s message about how powerful, emotions, such as anger, can be and how they can cause a character