Lord of the Flies Is a Terrifying Novel. How Far Do You Agree with This Statement? What Methods Does Golding Use?

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Lord of the Flies is a terrifying novel. How far do you agree with this statement? What methods does Golding use? Lord of the Flies is considered a frightening novel, because of the message it conveys: there is darkness within all of us. Some people, like Simon, understand this concept and he says: ‘Maybe there is a beast... maybe it’s only us.’ Other people, like Ralph, do not want to believe that there is a dark side to humanity and in Chapter 2 he constantly shouts: ‘but there isn’t a beast!’ Golding successfully gets across his message that there’s ‘darkness in man’s heart’ by the frightening way he describes several events in the book. The killing of the mother sow is an extremely shocking event in the novel. When it describes that ‘the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets’ it shows how savage the boys have become and how much they have changed, especially Jack, because at the beginning of the novel he had difficulty killing the piglet because of ‘the enormity of the knife descending and cutting in to living flesh’ and now ‘practice had made Jack silent as the shadows.’ The quote ‘wedded to her in lust’ shows us that they specifically want the female pig and won’t rest until they have her. The scene is extremely graphic and the notion of what they are doing is terrifying. The fact that the pig went from being ‘in maternal bliss’ to ‘dim-eyed and grinning faintly’ is also terrifying, because they took something innocent and turned it into something wicked, which is essentially what happened to them. The point that tells the reader that the boys have completely lost their innocence and civility is the brutal, but accidental, murder of Simon. They let their fear warp their vision and ultimately killed their friend because of their ignorance to what the beast actually was. The flashes of lightening and chanting work the boys up

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