Leadership and Survival Themes in Lord of the Flies Essay Sample

📌Category: Books, Lord of the Flies, William Golding, Writers
📌Words: 657
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 17 June 2022

William Golding’s story, Lord of the Flies, is a fictional novel about a group of boys stranded on an empty island. The story begins as a group of boys are stuck on an island after surviving a tragic plane crash. They all learn to gain leadership and survival skills as they had to work together to survive while being stuck on the island. Golding first introduces us to Ralph and a chubby boy who reveals he is called Piggy. They all elect leaders to develop an organization. Ralph, Jack Merridew, and a young boy named Simon are leaders except Ralph is the main one. They all might not get along well as they are in a tense partnership but they learn skills of being a leader. This story has many things we can take away from, such as how fear can significantly affect people's behavior. The roles of the leaders changed as things got worse on the island, and all the boys changed as they realized how crucial survival became. 

To begin with, fear played a large role in the transformation of the leaders into murderers. For example, in chapter 9 Ralph was terrified of the beast in the trees and ran away, bringing the rest of the group with him. Simon, who stayed behind, looked closely at the tree while the others were running and realized it wasn’t a beast. Simon ran through the bushes to tell the rest of the group about his discovery. Due to Ralph’s fear towering over the group, they all thought that the beast was chasing them, but it was Simon. “Simon was crying out something about a dead man on the hill” (Golding 152). Simon ran through the bushes to try to tell the rest of the group it wasn’t a beast, but it was a dead body. Because the group was so terrified, they ended up killing Simon who was just trying to protect them.  This is a clear example of how Ralph, as the leader, transformed into a killer because of his fears. This shows he wasn’t a good leader because he allowed his fear to take over him and he made the rest of the group scared.

Next, another theme in the book was the idea of survival. The extreme fear within the group transformed them in their thinking of what they needed to do to survive on the island.  For example, in chapter 2, the boys were all terrified at this point of dying on the island. This led to Ralph developing the idea of creating a fire on the island. This fire was to attract others in planes or boats to see the smoke and rescue them from the island. “ There’s another thing. We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire ”(Golding 38). The boys all searched the island for material and a good spot to create a nice and large enough fire so they could be saved. This is a good example of how fear of dying led the boys to come up with good ideas to keep them alive and ultimately a rescue.  Because they started the fire, Ralph, who came up with the idea, was able to be rescued. Sadly, Simon and Piggy had died along the way and Jack moved on with his new tribe.

To sum it up, Lord of the Flies has many themes. The Two most important themes that can be taken away from the story have to do with leadership and survival. We saw how the leaders of the tribe weren’t very successful in various parts of the story. They failed in being good leaders when they let their fears control them into killing Simon, who was just trying to protect them. We also saw how the boys were so scared of being stuck on the island that they came up with a solution that would hopefully help them to live.  These two themes of leadership and survival helped the reader to understand how fear can control a person in both good and bad ways.

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