Fire In Lord Of The Flies Symbolism Essay

Symbolic Value of the Fire In William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies, many aspects of symbolism are presented in his work. We learn early on in the book that a group of boys were on a plane to go to school during a nuclear war, but the plane abruptly crashed down on the island. The first character we meet is Ralph, a scrawny boy with rugged hair who isn’t sure what to do, but later on becomes a leader to the rest of the boys'. Ralph hears a noise in brush, and comes across Piggy, the obnoxious fat boy with “ass-mar.” The two boys begin searching for any others who were on the plane during the crash. Piggy and Ralph walk down by the water to clean their wounds, and spot a shell, Piggy gets excited and tells a story about how he knew someone who blew into it and it …show more content…
The meaning behind this is as the hunters and Jack all start to become this vicious hunter and savages, Ralph and Piggy have focused on getting off the island, focusing on what is most important. Jack sees this as a weak leader and has so much desire for Ralph's position, he is willing to chase Ralph all over the island to try and kill him to claim his spot as chief. As the boys are being hunted or hunters, the fire that they started to get off the island and back to civilization has torn them apart. Ralph is perplexed by this and doesn’t understand “how can we ever be rescued except by luck, if we don’t keep a fire going? Is a fire too much for us to make?...Look at us! How many are we? And yet we can’t keep a fire going to make smoke. Don’t you understand? Can’t you see we ought to—ought to die before we let the fire out?" (Golding 31). The boys inability to perpetuate a signal fire reflects with the boys' inability to create a civil society on the island. Their disagreement about taming the fire reflect their gradual descent into savagery, and it proves that there are law and order difficulties