Savagery In Lord Of The Flies Symbolism Essay

In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses symbolism and characterization to demonstrate that no matter where man is, no matter whom he is with, no matter how he was raised, man will always have savagery within him. As the book, Lord of the Flies, progresses, many notable things occur. Predominately, the boys on the island become savage creatures because they lose control over their id. (“The Id works on the pleasure principle - it seeks to avoid pain and increase pleasure at any cost. It drives us to search for food when hungry, rest when tired, and other basic impulses that ensure our survival.”) “They ate most of the day, picking fruit where they could reach it and not particular about ripeness and quality. They were used now to …show more content…
This type of behavior has led them to have stomach-aches and diarrhea. From this you can see that the kids are becoming savage creatures due to the fact they don’t care about anything except fulfilling their primal desires. Another item of interest is how their physical appearance degenerates over time. “They were very brown, and filthily dirty.’(p 49) They were dirty, not with the spectacular dirt of boys who have fallen into mud or been brought down hard on a rainy day. Not one of them was an obvious subject for a shower, and yet--hair, much too long, tangled here and there, knotted round a dead leaf or a twig; faces cleaned fairly well by the process of eating and sweating but marked in the less accessible angles with a kind of shadow; clothes, worn away, stiff like his own with sweat, put on, not for decorum or comfort but out of custom; the skin of the body, scurfy with brine.”(p. 97) This takes place because everyone on the island stops being concerned about their physical appearance. Some