The Beast and the Signal Fire

There is an imaginary beast that terrifies all the boys, this beast symbolizes the beast that is inside us all.  The boys are afraid of the beast, but it is only Simon reaches the realization that they fear the beast because it exists within each of them. As the boys grow more savage, their belief in the beast grows stronger. By the end of the novel, the boys are leaving it sacrifices and treating it as a god. The boys’ behavior is what brings out the beast , so the worse boys act, the more real the beast becomes. This enforces the idea that all of the boys have a little bit of evil inside of them that was only brought out because of the crash. If the boys still lived at home, none of the evil portrayed on the island would show. The signal fire is another symbol in the novel. The signal fire represents the final string the boys have tied to humanity. The signal fire is used to burn and attract ships passing by. When the fire notifies no ships, the boys lose hope. They stop lighting the signal fire and accept their fate to be stuck on the island. It is ironic that in the end of the novel a fire is what brings a ship to the island, but it isnt the signal fire. It is the fire that jack started in the fire as an attempt to kill Ralph. This shows how the boys have savagely changed in the novel and went from using fire to attain help to using fire to find and kill each other. The boys, their attitudes and views on life change drastically while living on the island. They transform from little boys to complete savages.