Nature In Lord Of The Flies Essay

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When one reads fiction novels, one usually does not question the scientific validity of the events; after all, they are mostly based on the imagination of the author. In Lord of the Flies, Golding puts a strong emphasis on nature, making the novel more science based than most other fiction novels. This special emphasis on nature makes it particularly interesting to examine the scientific phenomena that happen in the story. The three instances of scientific phenomena that are reviewed are the river, the fire, and the boys’ diet. Although the river depicted in the novel is scientifically possible, the creation of the fire and the boys’ rather complete diet have scientific inaccuracies.
One very important element in Lord of the Flies is the fire. …show more content…
There are many clues in the book that can help determine what kind of climate the boys are in. Since there are banana and palm trees on the island (9, 109), the boys are most likely to be in the tropics, further mentioned in the line: “The heat of the tropics, the descent, the search for food, and now this sweaty march along the blazing beach had given them the complexions of newly washed plums” (19). Although there are many small tropical islands with rivers in the world, most are not consistently surveyed. Because of this lack of information, one of the smallest islands in the tropics that has well-documented data on its rivers is Hawaii. Using information from the United States Geological Survey, it is possible to find rivers and streams that have similar drainage areas to the island in Lord of the Flies. One such river is the Wailua River near Lihue on the island of Kauai in Hawaii with a drainage area of 16.2 km² (“USGS Wailua River”). This river has had a very consistent discharge rate throughout the year with a total average of 1.34 cubic metres per second (see fig. 4), making the Wailua River ideal for drinking, cleaning and other human activities (Golding 35,

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