The Lord Of The Flies: Allegory

The book The Lord of The Flies is quite interesting with all the events that happen throughout it. The book starts with a group of boys being stranded on an island during World War Two after their plane is shot down. At first they establish an order and their own kind of civilization. But, as the story progresses, their order starts to fall apart. All of the boys bicker on what the proper thing to do is. This turn to chaos leads two of the boys to be killed and the island to be burned down. The Lord of The Flies, as a whole, is an allegory for the state of the world after World War Two. To clarify, an allegory is a message or opinion about the outside world or real life events given to a reader through a different context. In order to determine what the theme is through the allegory, you have to look at all of the symbols given in the story and what the message of the allegory is. This means taking how people are represented and applying it to the possible theme. In The Lord of The Flies, the main theme I found was that people can't have order without causing chaos. …show more content…
The Cold War was more or less a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to prove who was more powerful, although it could have easily turned to a nuclear war. This war lasted for the last half of the twentieth century and never resulted in any nuclear warfare occurring. Although the Cold War made a lot of people in that time fear for their lives with the possibility of a nuclear war that could have lead to an apocalypse. William Golding, the author of The Lord of the Flies, used an allegory to represent this situation because it sent two messages at once. It sent the message that the Cold War could Lead to terrible things or our downfall as a species. His book combined with the events of the Cold War shows us that humans are prone to fighting and trying to hurt one