"The Man in the Well," like Lord of the Flies, shows how brutally children can act when they aren't bound by consequences and the normal rules of society. Outside of the standard norms, children aren't yet old enough to have developed consciences that make them react with empathy in groups. This is shown in both the story and the novel.
The children who find the man down the well decide to keep him there indefinitely. When they don't help at first by alerting their parents to what's going on, they decide to instead bring him food and keep him alive in the well. This backfires on them when he finds out what their actual names are; there is now the possibility that they could get in trouble. They choose their own self-interest over helping another human being and decide to leave him in the well rather than risk their parents being upset with them.
The children stranded on the island in Lord of the Flies experience this on a much greater scale. They are completely outside the realm of normal society and adult supervision. Their empathy and concern for others evaporate as they form a new society built on strength. Simon is killed by accident, but Piggy is killed when he tries to impose order and rules on their new society. Jack and his followers choose to kill an innocent person rather than risk their own positions.
Both sets of children act in their own self-interest instead of helping and safeguarding others.
The main themes in Ira Sher's "The Man in the Well" are the need for control and the human tendencies toward callousness, savagery, and protection of one's own self-interest; William Golding's Lord of the Flies emphasizes the same themes.
In "The Man in the Well," a group of nine-year-olds discover a man trapped in a well. Instead of helping the man, the children abandon him after he learns their names. The need for control is a reverberating theme in this part of the story. The children most likely feel less in control of the situation once they accidentally reveal their names to a complete stranger. To protect themselves, the children abandon the man. The savage impulse to protect oneself at all costs kicks in. Hence, the boys decide to leave the man to his fate.
The same savagery and primitive instincts can also be noted in Lord of the Flies, in which a group of boys find themselves in a deserted island. At first, they want to establish an ordered, civilized society. This does not last long, however, once Jack takes control of the group. The group's downward spiral reaches its lowest level when they kill Simon and Piggy. The boys also hunt Ralph to kill him. Young kids, away from the watchful eyes of adults, might revert to their primitive tendencies, probably because of inexperience and immaturity—but Golding suggests that this tendency of human nature might be common to adults, too.
When the children stumble onto the man in the well, it occurs to them to go for help, but they soon agree implicitly to do nothing to get him rescued. They delude themselves that they are helping him by throwing food and water down at him.
The story's themes are the power of consensus over individual conscience, and the quick spread or contagion of mob mentality. Another theme in common with Lord of the Flies is the rejection of difference or deviance.
When Aaron breaks the unwritten rule and names them all, he resembles Simon in Golding's novel, trying to convince the other boys that the beast is actually them. Once evil has taken hold in a group, speaking truth to power may be ineffective if just one person speaks up and he will be ostracized or perhaps even destroyed.
One possible theme of "The Man in the Well" is how children create their own values, rules, and standards when they're no longer under adult supervision. This theme would certainly link the story with Lord of the Flies. The group of boys in "The Man in the Well" don't behave according to the prevailing norms of adulthood when they see that the man is trapped. Instead, they leave him to his fate despite promising to go get some help.
For the boys in both stories, there's an initial sense that they've been liberated from the usual constraints of home and school life. In Sher's story, the boys appear to feel that saving the man would somehow curtail the precious freedom they enjoy far from the prying eyes of their parents. They seem to like the fact that, for once, they are placed in the role traditionally fulfilled by adults, that they are the ones in control. It's a similar story in Lord of the Flies. Ralph and Jack each want to be in charge; they each want to take on the mantle of supervising adult.
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