Lord of the Flies Symbolism

Lord of the Flies Symbolism

Setting is a key aspect to everything that happens in any piece of literature. In William Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, the setting of the story has significant symbolic meaning. Golding’s story starts when an airplane slams and clatters on a deserted island and only the children are left to live. Also, it takes place during a war, which is what the plot relates to, and you come to find out that the island is a very isolated place with no association to the war. Although Golding never tells us the exact location of the island, he describes it well enough to the point where you would know what it is like to be there. Golding picked an island to be the landing place of the crashed plane because an island is secluded from the rest of the world. The boys have no unity with the outside world and must come up with a way to solve their own problems of their society. The setting of The Lord of the Flies is presented in conjunction with certain symbolic objects and comments to reinforce the novel’s theme of humanity. Settings like the Jungles creeper vines, the beastie (a.k.a. The Lord of the Flies), hunting pigs, and Simon’s “quiet” place and ,the Beach’s safe haven and the conch, and the Mountain’s signal fire all have symbolic objects/comments tied to them that represent how life on a deserted island transpires as the boys struggle with retaining their humanity.
The jungle is one of the most essential settings the island has to offer. It serves as the loss of humanity that takes over the boys. It presents objects/comments like creeper vines, the beastie (a.k.a. The Lord of the Flies), hunting pigs, and Simon’s “quiet” place. Creeper vines represent the jungle tangling and entrapping the boy’s state of mind just how the creeper vines actually caught them “in a curtain of creepers, throwing itself at the elastic traces in all the madness of extreme terror.”(Golding 31) Another object that depicts the loss of the humanity that the jungle represents is the...

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