When an individual is put into a new environment, conflict will transpire. In Willian Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, a group of youngboys get stranded on a deserted island due to an airplane accident. Thereare three very noticable conflicts in the story. There is man versus man,man versus nature and finally, man versus himself. In Lord of the Flies,conflict is crucial to the effecivness of the story. The first conflict in the novel is man versus nature. An example ofman versus nature is when the boys find the berries. They find the onlyberries on the island and then realize that the berries make them sick.
This is showing their fight against the island for survival. The boys hadto deal with the changing weather all the time. The storming wind at nightblew over their huts while they slept and ruined everything. The sun wasblistering hot all the time and it gave them all bad sun burns and theyonly had one pond to cool off with because they could not use salt watersurrounding the island. Man versus nature was not nearly as difficult asman versus himself.
The second conflict is man versus himself. Throughout the novel theboys think there is a beast living on the island with them. They can neverseem to find the beast, but are still determined to kill it. In this quote” ‘ The beast is a hunter… we couldn’t kill it. ‘ ” is when the boysrealize that the beast is just their imagination. All the boys have todeal with savagery. They are all slowly turning into savages and they areall losing grip. When Ralph says ” ‘ after all we aren’t savages reallyand being rescued isn’t a game’ ” he is realizing that they are not savagesand what is happening is not right. The boys all fought with a number ofthings, like fear and weather. It was a never ending battle.
The third conflict in this novel is man versus man. From thebeginning, Ralph and Jack have their disagreements. They struggle for theposition of leader, but in the end, they end up starting their own groupsand going off on their own. Slowly throughout the novel the children beginto turn on Ralph. The boys in Jack’s tribe begin to steal from Ralph andpiggy. They attempt to steal Piggy’s glasses to make fire. Jacks tribealso fights with Ralphs tribe for the conch many times, Eventually killingPiggy in effort to take the conch back. The boys faught with eachotherthroughout the story, it proved nothing, and only caused problems. Throughout the whole story, the boys struggled with many things. They faught with eachother which led to the destruction of their societyand themselves. If they learned how to cooperate with eachother and workwith eachother, they could have lasted longer, without their societybreakling and them having a war, the Naval officer would never have foundthe deserted island and rescued the boys. Aside from the deaths,everything worked out fine.
