Comparative Essay Example: Lord of the Flies and The Road

📌Category: Books, Lord of the Flies
📌Words: 672
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 29 March 2022

The books Lord of the Flies and The Road are both dystopian books that explore what humanity can turn into. This is shown through the characters’ fight for survival, loss of morals, and the state of their world.

The first similarity between the two is shown in their fight for survival. In the book Lord of the Flies, during a meeting between all of the children stuck on the island Ralph says, “There aren't any grownups. We shall have to look after ourselves” (Golding,33). The boys have realized that they are going to have to become independent if they want to survive on the island. The boys’ way of life is going to change drastically to ensure survival until they can be rescued. The example from The Road is when the narrator tells us that the father and son “ were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.” This gives us insight into what the father is planning to do to survive; he is using his knowledge from the past to adapt to this new apocalyptic world Both groups are adapting and changing their ways of life to ensure survival in their new environment.

Both of these stories explore the loss of morals of society In Lord of the Flies, Jack is with his hunting group out on a hunt, and Jack makes his first kill, “Jack was on top of the plant stabbing downward with his knife … The spear moved forward inch by inch and the horrified screeching became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack discovered the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands,” (Golding 120). This was Jack’s first kill in the story and he had no sense of remorse or hesitation in killing the pig. Most people who try to kill an animal for the first time show hesitation and after killing, feel remorse. Jack showed none of that; he jumped right in and brutally kept attacking until he found the neck and killed it instantly. In The Road, The father and son find a house on their travels and are going down a cellar after breaking the lock and find a gruesome sight: “On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt” (McCarthy 110). This quote shows the horrors that the Father and son find on their journey. The father now realizes whose house they are in; they are in a cannibal’s house and are now terrified of getting caught. The cannibals lost their human morals as soon as they decided to eat people alive for survival; by resorting to this evil deed, they lose their humanity in the process. 

Finally, the difference between the two books is in the world the characters live in. In The Road, the narrator talks about the city that used to exist. “Glasses the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.” This scene paints a picture of what the world is like for the Father and son. The people in this destroyed society have have stopped caring for where they live. In Lord of the Flies, the island is described as a wild but beautiful place: “All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another” (Golding 8). The island is in a warm climate that is full of life, and has everything needed to to give the children a habitable environment until  they are rescued. Despite the differences in their environments, the characters in The Road and Lord of the Flies end up destroying each other by letting their animal instincts take over and allowing their morals to fall away. It shows that it doesn’t matter what environment mankind is in, we can still lead to the same fate.

The characters in Lord of the Flies and The Road have the desire to survive, but that desire changes them, destroys their morals, and turns them into animals. Whether living in an island paradise or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, their savagery leads them to the same fate.

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