Essay/Term paper: Lord of the flies fact not fiction

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Lord of the Flies

William Golding the author of Lord of the Flies was born in Great Britain in 1911 and throughout almost his entire lifetime, he has lived and witnessed the true evil within all men. During his childhood the first World War beginning in 1914, and was followed many years later by the savagery of World War II. He has seen powerful dictators rise and fall; he has witnessed entire nations crumble, the massive slaughter of the Holocaust come and go, weapons of death destroy entire cities, and he has lived through a time when the world was divided in half and only a single spark was needed to set off what was needed for world destruction. It was during this time that Golding wrote the Lord of the Flies. The title itself suggests true evil and destruction; in Hebrew it is translated as Ba'alzevuv and in Greek, Beelzebub -- a pungent and suggested word for the Devil. This book is not about a group of young boys desolated on an island. It is about society; it is about about man, and it is about the true evil possessed within us all.
Golding uses the property of setting in Lord of the Flies as the first hint of the evil within man and society. The entire book is set upon a beautiful desolate island located probably somewhere in the Pacific near the first atomic bomb detonation. This land was pure and basic; it was a Garden of Eden, that is, until man arrived. Upon the boys' arrival (a plane crash), a scar was left on the island. It was a plane, an offspring of man's creation, that disturbed nature's beauty. Golding continuously showed how the setting was terrorized by
man. Man was not even there for one week and they have already destroyed half of an island that nature took years to create, and these men were mere children. Just think what real men have done to the entire world during the course of history. Lands have been raped, forests destroyed, and air condemned unbreathable. It is pure evil.
Golding, however, did not only use the setting and its destruction to demonstrate society's faults, he also used the characters in Lord of the Flies as a representation of the character and the evil behavior within society. Golding suggests that there are different types of people in society: those who choose to work and those who choose to play, those who are leaders, those who are thinkers, those who are troublemakers and those who are just mindless followers.
The main events expressed in Lord of the Flies are each a symbol of real life events that have occurred once before in history, and no matter how evil this book of fiction must seem, it is grim reality. The arrival of man to the island was somewhat a resonance of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. The New World was pure before them, but they slowly began to destroy it.. The boys stripped the fruits from the trees as the Europeans searched for gold and stripped the land of its resources hundreds of years ago. It is not a story about boys on an island. It is about society; it is about about man, and it is about the true evil possessed within us all. It is sad to say this, but this book is fact not fiction.