The island is first seen as like paradise, too good to be true. Ralph thinks: "Here at last was the imagined but never fully realised place leaping into real life" (P18). However, the island is soon found to contain many dangers. For example, coconuts fall from the trees and just miss injuring Roger, the sun burns them, and the isolation is a curse. Ralph reflects at the end that the island once had a "strange glamour" (P290), but becomes "scorched up like dead wood" (P290). The island becomes a burnt wasteland, as if as a punishment for all the brutality committed by the boys.
Another method Golding uses to convey inherent evil in mankind is the continuous violence in the novel. It is always present. It starts as a game, but grows more horrific throughout the novel. When he first finds out Piggy's name, "Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then returned as a fighter-plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned Piggy." (P12). When the first pig is killed, Jack boasts, "You should have seen the blood!"(P98). The ritual 'dance' revolves around violence: "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in." The boys become like wild and savage animals: when Jack hunts a pig he is "ape-like"(P67); Simon is killed by the "tearing of teeth and claws"(P219); Ralph becomes like a hunted animal, not a boy, at the end: "He raised his spear, snarled a little, and waited." (P279). The murder of Simon is particularly horrific because it involves all the other boys - they get caught up in the frenzied chant: "The crowd ... leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore." (P219).In the novel, the pig's head on a stick, covered in flies, is a horrific symbol of how far the violence has come. The pig was killed by Jack and his hunters and the head is put on a stick as an offering to the 'beast'. Only Simon really appreciates that the 'beast' is actually the evil inside the boys themselves and it is that which is breaking things up.
All the friendships and good...