The Allegory In Lord Of The Flies, By William Golding

In the allegorical novel, Lord of the Flies, the author William Golding incorporates elements that have a double meaning. Allegory means to “have a figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of the other,” according to Dictionary.com. At the beginning of the narrative, a group of schoolboys land on a secluded island when their plane crashes. Forced to survive without any adults, the boys are responsible for coming up with a plan that includes finding food, shelter, and order. Along the way they come in contact with concrete objects that represent symbolical meanings. These are necessary in the novel in order to make the readers dig deeper and figure out the novel's actual meaning. Three of the many elements used are Piggy’s glasses, their painted faces, and The Beast. An …show more content…
When the schoolboys discover what they think is the beast, they view it as a creature that they must hunt down and kill. Although it is not a concrete element, it is still an allegory because the boys think that it is real and end up revolving their lives around it. Golding asserts what the boys assume is the beast through an object coming down from the sky, “There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute a figure that hung with dangling limbs” (95). This is the beginning of the boys fear of the imaginary beast that slowly starts to take over them without realization. The more savage the boys become, the more the beast becomes a real struggle for them to cope with. The beast actually serves as the evilness within each of the boys that make them act like beasts. Essentially, the boys behavior is what creates the beast so that only means that the worse they become, the worse the beast becomes. As shown above, the beast is an allegorical element because it is seen in one way to the readers but requires deeper thinking that actually represents it true symbolical