Many important minor themes may come to mind regarding William Golding's Lord of the Flies, such as hostility, youth, curiosity, innocence, emptiness, primitiveness and meanness. While this may be true, there is only one main theme in this story: civilization versus savagery. Throughout the book, these kids fight with each other (and each other) over whether they should behave civilized or primitive. Bleeder by Stephen Dobyn is about a boy who fights the demons within himself that want to harm the handicapped boy in the camp where he is providing assistance. This too can have the theme of civility versus savagery due to the fact that he must refrain from being hostile and act normally. These two literary works share many of the same and/or similar themes. Several relationships can be established between Lord of the Flies and Bleeder, one of which is hostility. Both stories contain a lot of hostility, and in similar ways. In the book, hostility is shown when the boys become crazy hunting machines and are sort of obsessed with killing things. In the poem, hostility is shown when the "normal" boys in the camp have a constant obsession with harming the handicapped boy. Both deal with unhealthy obsessions and both have a negative impact on the events of the story. All this hostility had to come from somewhere: from children's curiosity. Curiosity always kills the cat, and these kids' curiosity wasn't that extreme, but it definitely didn't help. In the book, the boy's curiosity about hunting and finding the "beast" is what started the bloodthirsty urge to kill (Holding 35). Once they managed to hunt pigs and became good enough, they never wanted to stop. In the poem, the children's curiosity about what the handicapped boy was... middle of paper... He undid the snake clasp of his belt, took off his shorts and trousers and stood there naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water ” (Holding 10). Even one of the most civilized boys had his wild moments. Dobyns describes himself constantly fighting the urge to cut the boy with a stick or knife because he wanted to see him bleed. This is absolutely not a civilized thought. However, he and the other kids at the camp were civilized enough to know that it was unacceptable to hurt the boy because he showed no emotion, and they should have been. They had no reason to act like savages and yet they let their strange obsessions get to them, hurting themselves and others. This just goes to show that anything can trigger the primal ferocity within us, but how many of us can control the urge to break down and tear ourselves apart??