LOTF Themes-Evil

• Evil in Lord of the Flies

  • The boys come from a civilised background but the savagery inside them begins to take hold and drive events forward
  • The boys become violent hunters, destroying their environment and killing their fellow human beings
• Golding had seen first-hand the evil that was unleashed by the Nazis in World War Two
• As a teacher, Golding understood that without rules and civilising influences, a group of schoolboys would quickly revert to a primitive state
• How the theme of evil is shown in Lord of the Flies

  • Increasing violence
  • The Beast
  • The Lord of the Flies
• Increasing violence


  1. The isolation, lack of adults and a change within the boys takes over and they start to destroy their environment

  2. The play violence becomes increasingly menacing as the boys use warpaint and sing a bloodthirsty chant

  3. Eventually death and murder follow
• Evidence of increasing violence


  • "Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!"... At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws
• The Beast


  The mythical Beast takes on a variety of forms. First as a dream, then a snake or sea monster, then the dead pilot's body. The real Beast is the evil that lives inside the boys - but only Simon fully realises this and, ironically, he is killed when the other boys mistakenly think he is the creature itself.
• The Lord of the Flies


  Jack uses a pig's head as an offering to the Beast. Simon hallucinates that the head is talking to him. Golding calls it the Lord of the Flies - this is a translation of the Biblical name Beelzebub - another name for the Devil.
• At the time when William Golding was writing Lord of the Flies, Britain was a very different society. Although World War Two had ended in 1945, the after-effects were still being felt.
• Food rationing did not fully end until 1954, the year of the novel's publication.
• The war had ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. The world then entered a period of uncertainty as various nations began to develop their own nuclear weapons and there was a constant dread that a nuclear war would break out.
• In Golding's novel he imagines that this terrible event has actually taken place and the boys who are being evacuated to safety are stranded after their plane crashes.