Who Is The Beast In Lord Of The Flies

In The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, the character of the Beast embodies the basic human emotion of fear, and how it starts to develop into bigger extremes of fear over time. As fear builds up, savagery also begins to take hold of the boys. As the boys grow more vicious, the the beast becomes more real. The Beast develops first within the imagination of the boys, then it takes on physical shape, until finally, it becomes idolized as a totemic, god type figure.

In the beginning of the chapter, the Beast is what the smaller boys see at night in their dreams. Even though the Beast is nothing more than an appearance of imagery, it has the power to create fear in their minds. It takes on a shape as “the snake-thing... ” (Golding ..) that personifies itself as “things like ropes in the trees and hung in the branches…”(Golding..). The Beast has not yet had a physical appearance, but yet fear has given the little boys on the island the power to label the Beast as in the “beastie”. Later in chapter five, we see another imagery of the Beast transforming from a snake into a creature that rises from the sea. The new life form of the Beast isn’t created out of nowhere. Fear causes these boys to use their imagination to …show more content…
When Sam and Eric woke, they saw an enormous figuration of a parachute and heard the strange flapping noises that it made. The boys immediately took the forethought of the dead pilot as proof of existence of the Beast. Thinking that the beast of the unknown has been discovered, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has attacked them. This validates the fact that when someone is overtaken by fear, it overpowers all sense of rationality. Any hint of fear in the minds of the boys was automatically attributed to the existence of the Beast. Everyone on the island loses sight of their main target which is getting off the