The Beastie

Beastie. 

Beast or Beastie. 

It is a sign of fear. 

In Lord of the Flies, the boys have fears. The isolation of the island from civilization has made them lonely and loose senses of security. The absence of a normal lifestyle of a regular kid from the lack of proper shelter and companies from families and the authorities have created a sense that things are now different. The boys started to question their surrounding and make assumptions which consume their thoughts and produces a developing ongoing feeling of fear. They are afraid of encountering an unfamiliar figure. Fear of the unknown. Fear of going through a situation that they don’t know of and fear of coming across an entity that no one is aware is present. The boy in the island are influenced by the sounds roaming around at night and the mysterious dark shadows that seem to be following them. They call this a beastie. 

A beastie, supposingly a beast, is the form that the boys are fear of. The beastie is a manifestation of fear that the boys are experiencing, the result or the outcome of their imagination. In the novel, the beastie is a fundamental symbol of fear. It is one of the factors that caused the boys to think or to take actions that they did. The beastie was first acknowledge as the ‘snake-thing’ by the boy with the birth mark. Later on, boys started to express stories of their frightened self that they swore they saw the so called beastie. 

Why is ‘beast’ or ‘beastie’ chosen as the symbol of the boys’ manifestation of fear? A beast is simply a monstrous creature that triggers feeling of terrification in an individual. It creates a physical form of evil. A beast is the most realistic form of evil as qualities of beast are similar qualities as the qualities a wild or savage animal depicts. The setting in a deserted island with a forest is a great possibility of that creature to appear. 

What other things became a manifestation of the boys’ fear? 

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