- Analyse how the ending of the text reinforced or challenged your understanding of one or more ideas.
Note: “Ideas” may refer to character, theme, or setting
“Man produces evil like a bee produces honey - William golding
“Ralph wept for the death of innocence and the darkness of man’s heart”
“Allowing his eyes to rest on the cruiser in the distance’
“The island was scorched up like dead wood.
“Jolly good show, just like coral island”
“Man produces evil like a bee produces honey”- William Golding. Self proclaimed fabulist and author of ‘Lord of the Flies’ (LOTF), William Golding was a strong believer that by their very nature people are evil. In his novel LOTF this is shown throughout the text but culminates in the final ending where this idea is reinforced through the boys being saved by a military personal. This ending reinforces this idea by making it personal and real through the military, the boys were saved but who will save the us. This completes the allegory of the characters by making a direct comparison to an evil in our real world. Then through the state of the island at the end of the book which shows us how people treat the planet. And finally through the realisation of the Ralph which mirrors real life realisation that society is not perfectable. This reinforces the idea that man is naturally evil
LOTF is an allegory for the real world in a microcosm setting. The naval officer at the end of the book acts as a link to the real world to help us understand how the microcosm of the island scales to our real world. It shows how we will be eaten away by our own greed and be forced to suffer because man is naturally evil. This is linked with the real world through the way the Officer looks at his ship in the final line “Allowing his eyes to rest on the cruiser in the distance”. Golding had an ending like this to reinforce and highlight how evil man is through a real world example. This has the effect of scaling the island to our world, in this final line the reader is left thinking about how we will be saved with no higher power. Golding was a military officer during world war 2 and so he uses the cruiser as a metaphor of the evil of man and it symbolises the terrible things people are capable of. And through having it at the end and only over a couple of pages we are forced to think about how ridiculous the ending is, how they could be saved so perfectly, so ironically. It’s unnatural and what this makes us realise is that although it’s a fable, the moral doesn’t work as we aren’t going to be saved in the same miracle way. Because Golding believes we are doomed to suffer from our own burdens and that society can never be improved as it will never, as hard as it tries, be able to alter the very nature of people.
In the war Golding saw some of the vileness of man and this destroyed his belief in a perfectable society. This cemented in him the idea that man is naturally evil. In the end of the novel he finishes with a Deus ex Machina or a hand of god, where a sudden foreign force saves all the characters and their problems at the climax of the danger; this is done to get us to question the evil we have because unlike the boys society our society is not going to be saved by any great powerful force and our actions will culminate in our consequences. This is brought back to the idea of war where the action of people in power, the jacks, the ralphs, the piggies creates our wars. It shows how we as a world create our own problems, our own hate and create our own beasts.
This idea that man is naturally evil is shown in the way the island is in the end of the novel. It is completely destroyed and burnt to a crisp because of the hunt and the burning of the forest to kill Ralph. This is the destruction of their Eden-esque paradise by their inevitable sin. The destruction of the island is an extremely vile and evil act. William Golding had the setting like this in the end to show the dangerous and evil effect man has on this world, he would have seen this in the war but it is very appart with the gross rates of deforestation happening throughout the world as well as climate change and other serious effects… This reinforces the idea that man is naturally evil by showing the effect it has on the island paradise. “The island was scorched up like dead wood.” This simile compares the state of the island to the burnt wood in their campfires. This shows us the total power of man’s evil, the island paradise is now lifeless and destroyed, the life giving fruit trees and pigs dead, the shelters burnt to a crisp. This ending for the island also shows the natural evil of man, fire is used as a symbol throughout the book as the power we have. From the signal fire which is the boys “only chance of being rescued” to the tiny flame which “like a squirrel hopped from twig to twig” when the boys first lost control and then inevitably when they scorched the island in the hunt. This symbolism for power shows how the boys lost control and in the ending it shows how Golding believes our hate and natural evil will lead us to use our tools, which for the boys is fire but for the real world is things like nukes, greenhouse gases and biological warfare for our ultimate dome through war-sprung apocalypse or climate change. The boys were perfectly able to survive on the island sustainably but they couldn’t as they are people and are therefore evil. They had the tools to be rescued and survive but they instead use the fire to burn the island and try to end them. This links very well to the world where thousands of years has seen every stable ecosystem in the world being tampered with by the stain of mankind, look at the massive amount of extinctions in New Zealand where a majority of our bird species are extinct or endangered. Look at the state of the climate and the evil way greedy corporations or power hungry politicians prioritise their own wants over the needs of the world and the sustainability of OUR green paradise. People are naturally evil and this is reinforced in the ending of LOTF where the boys, literal children, fulfil their nature and turn their paradise into an ashen desert. This is taken directly from the real world and it doesn’t take any imagination to see this time and time again around us. People are naturally evil. We disregard the planet and our own survival to get what we want.
The idea that we are naturally evil is highlighted in the way Ralph reacts to his freedom. He understands man’s evil and has seen it so he cries for the burden of this information. “Ralph wept for the death of innocence and the darkness of man’s heart.” In this quote on the final page Ralph shows his understanding for the darkness of man’s heart. Heart here is a metaphor for our very inner being playing on the allusion that heart is the core of our love and being. Golding is saying that in the core of our being we are evil. This deep understanding is made ironic in the complete ignorance of the ‘grown-up’ officer who says “Jolly good show, just like coral island” earlier in the scene.(this is also an allusion to an adventure book which inspired LOTF mostly due to Goldings belief it is inaccurate and doesn’t reflect the darkness of man’s heart). He is unaware that he is controlled by the darkness of man’s heart, either the darkness of his own or the darkness of others and we likewise are unaware of the darkness which dwells within us all. The potential and the unacknowledged, unknown desire Golding believes we all have. This is made more ironic still through the way that throughout the book the boys talk about how ‘grown-ups’ would do better and save them or do the right thing throughout the novel, this is irronic as through the link to the military it is clear that ‘grown-ups’ have no better control over their evil nature than the children. Through this use of irony, metaphor and allusion we are led to the conclusion that man is evil. We are shown how we are unaware of it and how in a way like Ralph we try to live in the sweet freedom of innocence because the truth is rough. This shows the way man is evil and reinforces it through explaining why it isn’t obvious, our own want for it to be false and the burden of that information which Ralph gains at the end of the film.
Golding believed people don’t want to hear criticism even if it is the truth so he hides the moral of his fable-like novel in the engaging story of LOTF slowly giving us hints as to man’s true nature until the end of the novel. In the final pages where we are finally revealed through the Deus ex Machina and the officier saving them, the destruction of the island and the revelation of Ralph that we are naturally evil this is then reinforced and made relevant through comparisons to the state of our world’s climate and our inner turmoil between the truth Golding wrote and the hope and belief in the good of humanity as well as the placement from Golding ono us of the power we have over our own actions and the paradoxical lake of power we have over the darkness of our own heart.
