The Island Being

          So far in Lord of the Flies, every chapter has symbols reoccurring or emerging that have much allegorical meaning to what's going on, the characters, and the story itself. A few examples of symbols are the island, night and day, the colors, the pig, every character and all their traits and actions, fire, and more. The basis symbol that is a part of the whole story is the island. The island can represent many things, and one big symbolic connection is that it represents everything about the society of boys and that it reacts to every action from them, as the boys react to everything the island has to offer and how it naturally effects them. The island can represent hope, as it has given the boys a place to call their own and survive on, but the island can also represent savagery and death, because the boys will only rip themselves apart trying to survive there. Every opinion and trait of the boys has relation to the island, whether it brings destruction and death, like Jack, or serenity and life, like Simon, to the island. Metaphorically speaking, the island is a mirror, reflecting every action of the boys back at them through a literal moment or situation; a reaction of the island itself. When the boys let the fire they create go out of control on the island, this shows how they can create a literal, living hell, and how they can easily make hell of their island society. But on the island's level, the fire on the island was its reaction, responding from their actions with death from fire, and the deaths it produced, from nature to the littlun, could possibly be showing that the boys will bring their death upon themselves. When one of them does something that hurts the island or something on it, the island 'reflects' the action with a natural attack, which hurts itself, the island, but also one of the boys, teaching the lesson. In this way, the island is a being, mythological like the idea of 'Mother Earth', or Earth as a being; that nature is part of Earth's body, not just living on it. The island has many more symbolic aspects to the story, just like the infinite amount of other symbols, and these are some of them. Every chapter has new emerging or reoccurring symbols and allegorical meanings; so many, with so much depth.