"Take off the brakes of enforced control and boys, like men, will choose chaos rather than order." This statement by Anthony Burgess begins to explain and analyze what ideas William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, intended to expose. Burgess continues to say that, "The good intentions of the few are overborne by the innate evil of the many." This analysis of Golding's novel proves to support significant evidence that humans are naturally evil, unless that evil is tamed.
At first, Lord of the Flies, simply appears to be an adventurous story of a group of British boys whose plane crash-lands on a desert island. However, underneath this facade, there is a much more serious theme. The idea of the loss of innocence is one of the prominent themes in Lord of the Flies. At the start of the book, World War II is going on, and the boys" plane is shot down over the ocean. This large-scale war off of the island foreshadows what will eventually become of the children on the island in the near future. Throughout the entire story, we see the boys on the island gradually transform from orderly, well-behaved children, into cruel, bloodthirsty savages. When the boys first land on the island, they all have good intentions. Initially, the boys attempt to construct a civilized society on the island. They discover a conch shell, which they use as the basis for their island civilization. The shell also represents order and justice. This civilized world is at first successful, but progressively falls apart as the evil inside the boys grows, and eventually turns them into cruel savages.
"Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law." This quotation from Lord of the Flies shows that without rigid rules in a society, anarchy and savagery will result. The boys had been on the island for quite some time, and their moral standards were beginning to fade away.