On the surface William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a tale of a group of boys who are stranded on an island during a future war after their plane crashes. Ultimately their attempts to create a working society lead to the destruction of their ties to society and to each other. Yet on a symbolic level a comparative satire between the roles of adults and children in modern society appears. Golding creates a situation where children represent how adults handle the problems of society although they are much too big for a single person to handle. Adults come to represent their own hypocrisy, especially in the eyes of children, and the relationship between the two develops in light of how, when adults become preoccupied with their own interests, children sometimes get abandoned and left behind.

When the children realize they are the only survivors a leader is...