Authority In Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a story about how humans can denature and lose certain beliefs in a short amount of time. In Golding’s book, a group of young boys are stranded on a deserted island during the midst of World War II. The boys must learn how to be self-sufficient and work together to get rescued, but the boys turn savages without realizing what they had become. During the boys time on the island a series of unfortunate events occur before the boys are rescued by a passing naval officer. The time on the island the boys had show a strange part where they end up losing all normal traits and morals. Even though Lord of the Flies is a fictional text, when the boys separate into groups with leaders and obey those in authority …show more content…
Once the boys set the first sense of order when choose Ralph as the designated island leader, the boys decide they will use the conch to call meetings. Even if the boys were to be midway through an activity they would stop everything to go to where they heard the conch be blown from. This second sense of order is shown when Ralph blows the conch, “They obeyed the summons of the conch, partly because Ralph blew it, and he was big enough to be a link with the adult word of authority” (Golding 59). When Golding uses the word “obeyed” it shows that without a question from their conscience the boy go immediately to the site of the meeting. The use of authority is usually never questioned by authority and this is proven in both Lord of the Flies and the Milgram’s Obedience Study. For the Milgram’s Obedience Study, people were found using an ad in the newspaper and they were told to send potentially lethal “shocks” to a person being questioned, who was a confederate in the experiment, answered a question wrong. The biggest shocker during the experiment was, “many of the subject became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end” (Cherry). When Cherry says the subjects just continuously follow orders, even though they were “hurting” the confederates, this is an example of human nature when they listen to authority without reason. Humans will continue to do things even if they do not want to because humans are taught to

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