SavAGE

Books are a great tool for entertainment and understanding. Books answer lots of great questions that make people think really hard about. The big question I thought of after reading William Goldings’s Lord of The Flies was  who’s more savage adults or children? A reader of Lord of the Flies would choose children, because in the novel they were killers and robbers. Are children actually like that in real life? From robberies, stabbings and rape, to even various slayings, one would ultimately think that adults are the savages. Lets face it, adults and children can both be savage, but, adults have  furtherly developed brains, which in turn, allows them to know the difference between right and wrong, unlike children.

In the book Lord Of the Flies, the children who are stuck on an island started rituals. These rituals allowed them to have something in common, something they could all fall back on. In some of the rituals the children would scream some crazy things that may make the reader think of them as savages. Like a tribe, some of the characters had rituals. One of the rituals was a chant that said “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”(186). This quotes comes from children who are under the age of 12 and are scared of a beast. These children also are in a situation where they are on there own and trying to survive on an island. Researchers have found that the brain isn’t fully developed until around the age of 25. If these children are under 12 they aren’t half way through brain development so they don’t know right from wrong as much as an average adult.

On December 14, 2012 The second deadliest mass shooting by a single person in America occurred. Twenty year old Adam Peter Lanza killed 27 people including his mother. According to investigators Lanza killed his mother at their Newtown,CT home then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School where he killed six members of the staff and 20 students all of which were under the age of 8.  According to The Guardian“Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who convulsed America when he shot dead 20 young children and six of their adult carers at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut last December, was obsessed with mass murders in the run-up to his meticulously-planned attack and kept photocopies of newspaper articles on shootings of children dating back to 1891.” This show that Adam Lanza was nothing but a savage and he knew what he was doing. He had an understanding of what was going to happen and what he wanted to do. Adults aren’t oblivious to the actions of themselves. This shows that adults plan things and try to see how they are going to carry things out. Therefore they are more aware.

In Lord of the Flies some of the characters became more like a family. All together like a family was Ralph, Roger, Jack, Piggy, Simon and a few others. They were each other's shoulder to lean on and together worked to survive. The horrible decision of one person changed it all. “The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee: the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. Piggy fell 40 feet and landed on his back across the the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pigs after it has been killed”(181). This quote was a turning point in the book. This was when Jack and Ralph were fighting and Roger threw a rock. This makes children look like cold hearted savages. This shows that children don’t think as much as adults because their brains aren’t fully developed. Roger probably didn’t think or want to kill Piggy, he probably just wanted to give a warning.

There could be many factors into why adults do outrageous things. No matter the factors it still can be considered savage. One common factor in barbaric activity is mental illness. According to the New York Times “Medical experts at Yale University had called for drastic measures to help Adam Lanza in the years before he shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but those calls “went largely unheeded” by his mother, who was also shot to death”.  It also says “based on a comprehensive examination of the medical and school histories of Mr. Lanza, 20, found he was “completely untreated in the years before the shooting” for psychiatric and physical ailments like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was also deprived of recommended services and drugs.” These quotes show that there’s a reason why adults may be more savage. It shows that mental illness is a factor in why adults are more savage. The mental illness could have been caused by boys mother in which over time made him more of a savage but he knew what he was doing. Adam is also more savage because he could have made the decision to get medication himself. By the age of twenty years old in the U.S. a person is allowed to make medical decisions by themselves. There is no excuse for someone to not get on meditation if the person’s doctor recommend it to them.

As it turns out adults have furtherly developed brains, which in turn, allows them to know the difference between right and wrong, unlike children. In Lord of the Flies things that were said were uncivilized and people were killed. These were children whose brains were not in far development to completely understand what they were doing. In the 2012 shooting death of 26 people, shooter Adam Lanza knew what he was doing. Adam planned it all out and knew what he was going to the school to do. What people can get out of this is that many factors play a role in being a savage, but brain development makes people more and less of a savage.

Work Cited: Golding William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee 2006

Work Cited: Pilkington, Ed. "Sandy Hook Report – Shooter Adam Lanza Was Obsessed with Mass Murder." N.p., 25 Nov. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.