Lord of the Flies & WWII/Holocaust Connections

The fear and darkness of the time period had spread to all living souls in surrounding of the terror. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, takes place around 1950 during one of the evilous events in human history. The Holocaust was a horrible act of exterminating humans for not being the way Hitler, in his mind, pictured for the human race. Lord of the Flies is a novel that has symbols with hidden meanings that historically relate to The Holocaust.

Written below is information giving the ability to identify and understand the relation between them, it is crucial in order to get the full experience of the novel. This literature resembles the dehumanizing of the times and leadership being shown in the shadows of it all the history. The ignorance to the European horror created the issue to become bigger than it should’ve been. During WWII Jewish citizens of the European nations were in constant fear of the German Nazi regime. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. The Jews were persecuted, tortured and slaughtered in concentration camps (The Holocaust 1). Night by Elie Wiesel is the powerful memoir of his experiences during the Holocaust. Night shows the tragedy of the Holocaust through the use literary devices, including the themes of loss of faith and cruelty toward other human beings, night as a symbol of suffering and fear, and the use of first person narrative. – Six million perished in the flames, mass shootings and gas chambers of concentration camps during the Holocaust. This started when the Nazi party established a Final Solution that sought out to eradicate the inferior Jewish race from Germany and the world (Holocaust ).

A person cannot look at this event and see nothing except for the dark, evil side of human nature. Lord of the Flies, which was written by William Golding, and The Coral Islands, which is written by R.M. Ballantyne were two books about British boys who were stuck on an island. Lord of the Flies is an imitation of The Coral Island. In Lord of the Flies the scene is set up with two boys stranded on an island from a plane crash, in which all the adults died. These boys were schoolboys that later found more boys that were stranded on the island by blowing on a conch shell. At the time Golding wrote the novel, the world was caught in war with itself. Certain events during WWII such as the holocaust led people to begin to question civilization and human nature. Golding uses the Lord of the Flies as a social criticism which analyzes how a civilized culture can still commit primitive and even barbaric atrocities. Golding uses symbolism to create a social criticism. During the holocaust, Piggy was only referred by his nickname, much like how during the holocaust, Jews were stripped of their names and called demeaning names and slurs. Comparing Lord of the Flies to Hitler’s Regime and the Holocaust, The Dehumanization of Piggy and also the Jews: Hitler found power at a time when Germany had been at an all-time low. Just Like Hitler, Jack would always be a great orator, and utilized his charm to persuade another boys in order to his point associated with view (Adolf Hitler Biography).

Also, both groups, being the boys and the Nazis, show untrembling loyalty to their leaders, the chief and Hitler. Both groups thought what they were doing was right, they were missing the big picture of their actions and wouldn’t let anyone change their mind. When Roger kills piggy, it was almost a direct connection to Nazi’s killing Jews. The way the killing went, it seemed as though Roger didn’t think that much of it, much like the Nazi’s. It was like second nature to them. The evilous events in this period were behind the scenes in Lord of the Flies resembling the dehumanizing and leadership problems of the times during The Holocaust. Piggy was dehumanized multiple times throughout the book as were the Jews during 1940s and 50s. Leadership was also a problem as the boys in Lord of the Flies as many occurances showed they were incapable of their tasks and their tasks were not always the right thing to do, as did Hitler. Lord of the Flies resembles parts of the Holocaust and has hidden similar details throughout the incredible story of the boys’ survival.

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