Gone Mad

Gone Mad

     Do the natural outdoors have a big enough impact on someone to make them go ¨mad¨? In this day in age people are used to their luxuries. Even the littlest things that people may use everyday such as air conditioning or heating or the ability to flush a toilet are in fact luxuries. These functions are now now considered normal. So if  someone with these luxuries were dropped on an island with nothing but their will to live, what is their first thought? Survival.

     In the novel ¨The Lord of the Flies¨ by William Golding, a group of boys were stranded on an island and could be described as crazy. The author had been in a situation related to the boys when he served in the Royal Navy for about six years. His experiences may have influenced his writing of the novel. After days of surviving on an unknown island, in ¨Lord of the Flies¨, a young boy by the name of Simon starts to see what he perceived to be a demon.  The poor boy was being chased by a pig's head on a stick that was held upby the older boys. But through his exhausted eyes, it was a beast, something the children had dubbed “The Lord of the Flies”. This was Simon's fear being brought to life to terrify him, but was also a way that the other boys could have fun terrorizing the young boy. As the ¨beast¨ followed Simon through the woods, it spoke, ¨There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the beast.¨(143) The fear that Simon had been experiencing had caught up to him in an abrupt moment causing him to imagine the pigs head on a stick to be alive. The Lord of the Flies received a small victory when Simone looked deep into the beast's eyes and blacked out.

     In an article about the studies of APA President Philip G. Zimbardo, it talks about the reasoning for certain behaviors that may be viewed or even diagnosed as ¨mad¨. Zimbardo had a theory that maybe madness is a symptom brought on by an unexpected event or change in a person's everyday life. Zimbardo did a study on a few college student volunteers and found out that if the student is under a lot of pressure and stress, or if his/her surroundings are stressful or any other emotion to the extreme, that their response to it can be influenced by the amount of one emotion being forced onto them.

     In relation to the book, Simon had been influenced by the over producing fear that him and the rest of the boys were surrounded by. The boys had experienced a huge change in their day to day pattern when they were dropped on an island and relied on each other to survive. Simon, being one of the younger boys, was more susceptible to fear, causing his emotions to get scattered more easily and in result, he started to go mad. Zimbardo had talked about when someone is put in a situation they cannot deal with, that their coping mechanisms may result in behaviors labeled psychopathology. ¨When the volunteers were unable to come up with acceptable explanations or social comparisons for their arousal, their inability to deal with it would eventually lead to predictable symptoms of psychopathology.¨ This can relate to Simon in that he could not find a way to deal with his fear, and so it soon turned into a beast.

     The novel ¨Lord of the Flies¨ by William Golding represents the fact that normal people can go mad, and this relates to the real world because there have been studies proving the how and why normal people go mad. The environment in which a person is placed can have a big enough impact on that person to make them go mad. This study can help society by recognizing that it is possible to go mad due to a situation or surroundings of a person.