Social Allegories in Lord of the Flies

The Lord of the Flies if taken at face value can be taken as a short book about the struggle to stay alive on a deserted island and its physical and psychological influences on its residents. However, when the reader looks deeper, they see a story that is an allegory filled with rich and detailed imagery in almost all facets of the novel. An allegory is defined as a type of writing that presents abstract ideas or moral principals in the form of symbolic characters, events, or objects. "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature" (204). R…