Still Children

The day a baby is born is the most innocent moment of their life. As the child grows and develops, he or she relies on parents and authoritative figures to show them the proper, civilized way of behaving and use their parents to maintain that innocence as long as possible. This guidance shapes them into the young adults they will later become. For example, on their first day of kindergarten, parents will make sure to clean up their “unwiped noses” and brush out their “matted” bed-head hair before sending them off to the school bus. As the child begins to mature and their hormones begin to “[shake]” them up a bit, a parent is always there to wipe their “flow[ing]” tears and tell them to stay strong and rise above it all. Without this vital guidance, kids might lose their way and encounter “the darkness of man’s heart”. In the novel Lord of the Flies, Golding illustrates the importance of those figures through effective dashes and descriptive diction concerning the rescue of the boys of the island.
At the end of the novel as a British Naval officer “visualized” the chaos of the “show” before him, his shock and disappointment and the boys’ shame and embarrassment was evident through the presence of dashes. The officer stuttered his way through his words as he tried to make sense of what this “pack of British boys”—or so he wondered—had laid before him. The boys tried to explain themselves because they knew their actions were wrong, but had no way to end their sentences with a proper explanation. The more obvious explanation, neither the officer nor the boys understood at the time, was the boys were just too young to know how to run a micro-society of sorts without the experience gained from a complete childhood.
In the presence of the Naval officer, “shuddering spasms of grief...infected” the minds and bodies of almost every boy, sending them into a reflective moment of their time on the island. Every regret was highlighted, every victorious moment faded. The “little boys” abandoned every morsel of “darkness” lurking in the “black smoke” and gave themselves up to “the end of [their] innocence.” With gripping diction, Golding was able to convey a sharp sense of anguish with a hint of relief from the boys to show the abundance of emotion that had accumulated in the novel. As Golding subjected us to his morbid words he was able to emphasize the boys’ lack of guidance and stability that a child requires for any kind of success.
This certain pack of boys, in the mere slot of time they inhabited this island , brought reproach upon the officer, themselves, and their country. They let their inner savagery take over any rational thinking they had been taught before crashing on that fateful island. With this newfound, forbidden freedom and the tempting “glamour” of losing their ways of the pretentious British, their behavior sent them on an ember-ridden downward spiral to ash. The effects of an unguided youth can be deadly in more ways than one.