An Island Not So Perfect
There is a very thin line between utopia and dystopia. A utopia is a place in which everything is perfect. A dystopia is exactly the opposite, a place in which everything is horrible. William Golding's The Lord of the Flies follows a group of young boys whose plane has crashed on a deserted island. The boys are forced to try to survive until they are rescued. Golding wrote the book as a narrative of real life, and used many allegories to represent things that he thought were wrong with society. Golding uses the differences between the presence of fruit on the island, which suggests a utopia, and the presence of meat, which suggests a dystopia, and the similarities between the lack of laws and the boys' total freedom to show that the island is both a utopia and a dystopia. He uses this as an allegory for how the world is not simply black and white.
Contrasting…show more content… Every child's dream is to live in a world where there are no straitlaced adults telling them what to do. This is exactly what the boys experience, and they are very happy that they can do whatever they want without consequences, or surveillance by "the man with the megaphone" (Golding 7). In celebration of their independence, their normal manners and means of conduct quickly disseminate. At the same time, the freedom means that they can do horrible things without any consequences. This, above all, is what leads Jack's fall into savagery. The lack of adults also hints at the fact that the boys are entirely alone on the island, and that nobody will save them. The fact that there are no adults on the island suggests that the island is a utopia in that the boys have total freedom, but suggests that it is a dystopia because the boys abused the freedom that came with the island and became savages. These similarities make the island the enigma that it
