Lord Of The Flies: Freud Essay, Research Paper

Children all over the world hold many of the same characteristics. Most children are good at heart, but at times seem like little mischievous devils. Children enjoy having fun and causing trouble but under some supervision can be obedient little boys and girls. Everybody, at one time in their lives, was a child and knows what it is like to have no worries at all. Children have their own interests and react to different things in peculiar and sometimes strange ways. For example, children are enchanted with Barney and his jolly, friendly appearance without realizing that he is actually a huge dinosaur. In the novel The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, one can see how children react to certain situations. Children, when given the opportunity, would choose to play and have fun rather than to do boring, hard work. Also, when children have no other adults to look up to they turn to other children for leadership. Finally, children stray towards savagery when they are without adult authority. In Lord of The Flies, Golding succeeds in effectively representing the interests and attitudes of young children in this novel. When children are given the opportunity, they would rather envelop themselves in pleasure and play than in the stresses of work. The boys show enmity towards building the shelters, even though this work is important, to engage in trivial activities. After one of the shelters collapses while only Simon and Ralph are building it, Ralph clamors, “All day I’ve been working with Simon. No one else. They’re off bathing or eating, or playing.” (55). Ralph and Simon, though only children, are more mature and stray to work on the shelters, while the other children aimlessly run off and play. The other boys avidly choose to play, eat, etc…. than to continue to work with Ralph which to them is very boring and uninteresting. The boys act typically of most children their age by being more interested in engaging in enjoyable activities than working and doing necessary work. Secondly, all the boys leave Ralph’s hard-working group to join Jack’s group who just want to have fun. The day after the death of Simon when Piggy and Ralph are bathing, Piggy points beyond the platform and says, “That’s where they’re gone. Jack’s party. Just for some meat. And for hunting and for pretending to be a tribe and putting on war-paint.”(163). Piggy realizes exactly why the boys have gone to Jack’s, which would be for fun and excitement. The need to play and have fun in Jack’s group, even though the boys risk the tribe’s brutality and the chance of not being rescued, outweighs doing work with Ralph’s group which increase their chance s of being rescued. Young children need to satisfy their amusement by playing games instead of doing work. This decisively shows that the children are more interested in playing than doing unexciting labor, which is expected of people their age. When children are without adults to look to for leadership, they look for an mature child for leadership. At the beginning of the novel, when the boys first realize they are all alone, they turn to Ralph for leadership. After Ralph calls the first meeting, Golding writes, “There was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance, and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had sat waiting for them.” (24). The boys are drawn to Ralph because of his physical characteristics and because he had blown the conch. The fact that there are no adults has caused the boys to be attracted to Ralph as a leader. The physical characteristics of Ralph remind the boys of their parents or other adult authority figures they may have had in their old lives back home. There is also the conch that Ralph holds which may remind the boys of a school bell or a teacher’s whistle. Finally, at the end of the novel, the boys turn to Jack to satisfy their need for some much-needed leadership. When the boys are feasting on the meat of a freshly killed sow, the narrator says: Jack spoke ‘Give me a drink.’ Henry brought him a shell and he drank. Power lay in the blown swell of his forearms; authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape. ‘All sit down.’ The boys ranged themselves in rows on the grass before him. (165) Jack now has full authority over the other boys. The boys look to Jack for his daunting leadership which intimidates them. Jack is very forceful and his ways most likely remind the boys of authoritative figures in their past who may have strapped, beaten or used other forms of violence when disciplining the children. Therefore, the children when left without adult authority figures turn to others who can replace that adult authority figure. In this case, Jack has taken that role, and has control of the boys. In addition to seeking adult-like authority figures, children lose their purity of heart and stray towards savagery when not around adult influence. When the boys have been on the island for a short time, they start to show more violence, but when they realize what they have done they become contrite, and embarrassed by their actions. After Maurice destroys Percival’s sandcastle and some sand gets in Percival’s eye, the narrator writes: Percival began to whimper with an eyeful of sand and Maurice hurried away. In his other life Maurice had received chastisement for filling a younger eye with sand. Now, though there was no parent to let fall a heavy hand, Maurice still felt unease of wrongdoing. (65) Maurice has hurt Percival but feels bad about it because in his past life he would have been punished for it. Without adults, Maurice is turning towards barbarianism but has not been away from the order and discipline of his previous life to be considered a savage. Children misbehave when not around adults because there is no one to discipline or punish them. Yet, for a brief time after the children have been away from adults, the children will feel remorseful. Also, after the boys have been absent from structured discipline, they become blatant savages and retain absolutely no innocence. When Piggy and Ralph visit Castle Rock to get back Piggy’s glasses, Golding says: Roger, with a sense of delirious abandonment, leaned all his weight on the lever. The rock struck Piggy. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across that square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. (200) Without apprehension, Roger performs the horrible and violent act of killing Piggy. Roger has now been without adults to discipline him for quite a long time and his actions have become more intensely brutal. The boys have been unpunished for so long that they continually become increasingly violent and thus, have made the final step to becoming all out savages. Typically, children are reprimanded for their misbehavior and as they mature, what is right and what is wrong becomes embedded in their brains to the point where they almost never stray towards uncivilized behavior. Clearly children can quickly forget what is right and what is wrong, especially when being away from adults for any extended period of time, often resulting in a loss of innocence. The relationship between supervision and reaction to supervision is excellently portrayed in this novel. Lastly, at the end of the novel when around the naval officer arrives, the boys