In William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," a group of young boys is stranded on an island after their plane crashes. Piggy, the outcast of the group, is the only one who wears glasses. When they arrive on the island, his glasses are shiny and clean. However, after a boy named Jack breaks the glasses, they start to get dirtier and dirtier the longer the boys are stranded. The glasses represent the influence of society on the boys. When the boys first arrive on the island, Piggy's glasses are clean. Piggy is constantly cleaning his glasses, especially when he's embarrassed. In one instance of glasses cleaning, the other boys are making fun of Piggy. Making fun of others is considered wrong in modern society. So the cleaning of the glasses is meant to represent Piggy trying to polish the wrong from the group.
Society's influence on the boys starts to really decline when Jack knocks the glasses off Piggy's face and breaks them on a rock. Piggy has "to have them specs " (Golding 72) because he wants the group to be orderly and just. This is how normal society would want a group to work together. Yet when the glasses break, Jack slowly starts turning more and more savage. Jack breaking Piggy's glasses represents him breaking away from society. Not long after the glasses break, Jack decides to make his own tribe. And when he is no longer under Ralph's influence, he reverts back to a primitive mindset and feels the utter need to murder a pig.
One night, the boys are sitting around a fire and making fun of the adults who died when the plane crashed. When Ralph is talking about how the adults wouldn't be fighting, Piggy mentions how the adults "wouldn't break [his] specs " (Golding 94). The adults would be acting morally and would be following the rules in a time like this. They wouldn't be sitting around making fun of dead people. When Jack steals the glasses, the influence of society on the boys has virtually disappeared.
