Question

Read the passage from Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

He passed his tongue across dry lips and scanned the uncommunicative forest. Then again he stole forward and cast this way and that over the ground.

The silence of the forest was more oppressive than the heat, and at this hour of the day there was not even the whine of insects. Only when Jack himself roused a gaudy bird from a primitive nest of sticks was the silence shattered and echoes set ringing by a harsh cry that seemed to come out of the abyss of ages. Jack himself shrank at this cry with a hiss of indrawn breath, and for a minute became less a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the tangle of trees. Then the trail, the frustration, claimed him again and he searched the ground avidly.

What is the universal theme of this passage?

the tension between truth and illusion
the relationship between violence and human nature
the relationship between civilization and nature
the conflict between an individual’s desires and the community’s needs

Answer 1

the relationship between violence and human nature

Jack's furtive, animal-like behavior, the focus on hunting and the "abyss of ages" cry, and the description of his sudden shrink and then renewed, avid search emphasize primal, violent instincts emerging in a human—showing how violence is tied to human nature.