Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, describes the natural tendencies of evil and savagery in human society and civilization's continuing successful transition from the law-abiding civilization to the savage, untamed state of chaos and war. A group of English public schoolboys was victim of a WWII airplane attack and became confined to a tropical island. Being in complete isolation and left in the state of nature, these models of British boyhood abandon social norms and quickly revert to barbarism, ritualism, and murder. They attempted to form a civilized form of government, but found their attempts feeble and their social order quickly deteriorated into one of savagery. Golding ventures several different themes in Lord of the Flies, but his major theme is "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." -William Golding. Golding suggests that humankind represents a barbaric and savage species that cloaks itself with the appearance of a cooperative, ordered, and harmonious civilization. He uses an arrangement of symbolism to intertwine the integral aspects of this dissertation. One of Golding's symbolic influences in his novel is the portrayal of evil and savagery, a natural tendency of humankind, in the actual existence of "the Beast."
             In their continuing process of leaving behind civilization, the smaller children fear the unknown and invent the notion of a beast. The beast illustrates the evil that resides within mankind. The boys were all aware that such a beast exists, but none of them realized (except Simon) that it lies within them. Manifested in three forms throughout the story, the beast constantly plagues the littluns-the least conditioned by society. The beast is mentally...