How Does Golding Explore the Boys’ Steady Degeneration Into Savagery and Violence

How does Golding explore the boys’ steady degeneration into savagery and violence?

Golding explores the boys’ steady decline from a fairly just society to one with few rules and little respect for any individual, in many ways because it is a key feature and underlying meaning or parable of this book. It is to show how society is never stable even when it feels that does at its most, this is because of the views and actions of others, and this is explored by Golding in many ways. This comes about because of the different views between the boys and their different opinions not just because one of them believes for example that they should do something but because of the influence that one has over the other which leads to a separate belief and then ultimately onto chaos due to the handling of the situation.

To start with the passage on pages 15-17 about the boys being sat on the platform (after Ralph has blown the conch) and the arrival of the choir as they or as “the creature stepped from mirage” and into view. This is significant to the ways in which Golding explores the boys degeneration because it is acknowledging the arrival of a power, the power being not Jack alone, not the boys in the choir but the knowledge and background of school and life they both come from and bring with them. It is not the people but instead the ideas that these people bring that will inevitably start the decay of the boy’s society into barbarism. This is because these boys come from a choir school, which, by their nature, are elitist – probably just as much as the more severe public (private) schools of that time. The boys were most familiar with the organisation of hierarchy, a sense of order and directly strict. Beatings by boys and masters would have been common. Without that strict regime and following such past conditioning it is obvious that the arrival of the choir signifies the arrival of over-strictness and dictatorship qualities. This shows that the choir is...