Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part L (2025)

This paper explores how extreme conditions expose the fragility of human morality by comparing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Both novels confront the ethical dilemmas individuals face when survival and conscience collide, but they do so through sharply contrasting contexts—one through the absence of civilization, the other through its corruption. In Lord of the Flies, moral breakdown emerges from the removal of social constraints, revealing humanity’s latent capacity for savagery once authority and punishment disappear. In contrast, The White Tiger depicts a world where systemic injustice renders ethical behavior nearly impossible, forcing individuals like Balram Halwai into morally compromised choices. Using psychological frameworks from Freud and Kohlberg alongside philosophical insights from Renée Zheng on systemic constraint, this study argues that moral collapse arises either from the disintegration of external order or from entrapment within unjust systems. Ultimately, both novels demonstrate that moral transgression—whether born of instinct or necessity—leaves irreversible psychological and ethical consequences, underscoring the need for societies that enable genuine moral agency rather than survival through compromise.