In William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, a group of British schoolboys have crashed upon a desert island while being taken away from a war which is destroying the world. Forsaken and forlorn, what starts as a story from The Boxcar Children, ends up turning into anarchy, as the brutal primal instincts inside all of us envelop the boys. The leader of this anarchy is Jack, an ugly little child who unfolds to become a fascist, power hungry tool of the devil, the Lord of the Flies. Jack progresses through the story at an incredible pace. His evolution backwards into the core of human nature starts in the first chapter, and escalates up to a mighty crescendo, but he's stopped before he commits his ultimate act of violence.
There are no parents to set limits on the island, and Jack seems to feel that adults are the only people worth paying any respect to, "...the fairheaded boy with the creamy shell on his knees [Ralph] did not seem to satisfy him." Without the boundaries set by adults to sustain them, Jack and all of the other children are prone to forgetting the enactments that have kept their world entact until now. As they forget these rules, they become set up for their raw human self-preservation to come out in them. This human nature, this capacity for anger and violence in the boys is the beast. Every time Jack gets angry, the beast comes out in him and pushes him farther into his own savage being. When the book starts out, Jack is known as "Merridew" since it's a name that makes him feel adult and in charge, one given to him by the English society. When he loses the election to Ralph, he becomes humiliated and angry. This is his first push by the beast, for after the election, he is no longer known as Merridew, but just as Jack.
From the beginning, we are aware that Jack is extremely violent, and this is without the help of the beast. This is why Jack was able to "give in" to it so quickly; he didn&ap...