Lord Of The Flies

14 Pages 3623 Words

Creating a Community from Eden
The Human nature and Sovereignty in the Lord of the flies
Lord of the Flies is a very famous novel; most of critics discuss its human nature and compare it with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Shakespeare’s The Tempest. However, there are few of them comparing it with Thomas Hobbes’s theory. Therefore, in this paper, I want to use Thomas Hobbes’s idea of human nature and sovereignty to analyze the novel and Golding’s idea. Thomas Hobbes is the English political philosopher, in his famous work Leviathan; we can easily find his pessimistic thinking about human nature. For Hobbes, men only care about themselves without regarding others. They lust for money and pleasure; sometimes even lacking of food can cause a human war. Hobbes’s concept can coincidentally response to Golding’s idea and his novel, both of them emphasize the dark side of human nature. For example, in the novel, Golding arranges English schoolboys to fall into an island of nature; he uses this unmanned island to show what cultivated humans will do in their nature. Where is his pessimistic idea in the novel, is that, he does not arrange those schoolboys still live in a cultivated and mannered life on the island, he rather makes them live like barbarians and completely shows their natural evil. His pessimism is just as Hobbes who thinks men are born in evil and lust.
Hobbes’s idea is influenced by the time his was born. He was born in an age of war that makes him to become a pessimistic philosopher. In his biography, he says, his mother “brought forth twins—myself and fear .” He considers that the fear of death and the need for security are the universal law; people seek for peace and constitute social rule only because they want to be safe and preserve their lives. His pessimistic idea builds up his theory toward the sovereignty and human nature in the future. Besides, the time when he was b...