What Does Richard’s Decisions Leave the Map Suggest About His Character and Human Nature?

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Drugs:

Although laws against drugs are strict in Thailand, some, particularly marijuana (dope), are relatively cheap and easy to obtain. Smoking dope is part of daily life in the Beach community and there is a ready supply because drug dealers are using the isolated island to cultivate fields of marijuana plants. Mutual tolerance: Neither the dealers nor the community can reveal the other’s secret to the authorities without getting into serious trouble themselves, so they exist in an uneasy tolerance of each other. However, the arrival of yet more travellers, this time bearing a map, is too much for the dealers to take and they murder them and bring the mutilated bodies to the camp to act as a warning to the others.

Breakdown of civilization:

The Beach has been compared to Lord of the Flies by William Golding (winner of the Nobel prize for Literature in 1983) which tells the story of a party of schoolboys stranded on an island after their plane is shot down during a war. In this novel, too, a community is formed that seems idyllic until divisions start to occur. Both books portray a society isolated from the rest of the world which starts to disintegrate under pressure, leading to a descent into primitive tribalism, characterized by violence and a struggle for power. In Lord of the Flies, the boys kill two of their number and are engaged in a wild hunt to kill a third when they are rescued from the island. This is echoed in the festival at the end of The Beach when the travellers mutilate the dead bodies of the rafters and turn on Richard. Both books suggest that civilization is a fairly thin veneer and that without the constraints of organized society, humans tend to descend into barbarity

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