...'LORD OF THE FLIES' by William Golding “Revision notes can never replace knowing the books thoroughly” J.W.Evans These notes should be used as pointers to the directions that your thoughts might take. They are not meant to replace your reading of the novel, you must still do that yourself.. CHARACTERISATION Never forget that we are talking about a group of boys whose maximum age is twelve. RALPH Does he represent all that is good in people? Tall, fair-skinned, blond hair, very athletic, natural leader although not that good a leader as many of his decisions are questionable, which ones?. He is middle-class, father a naval officer. Elected leader but not forceful enough to maintain position. Eventually he loses support and is reduced to the status of an outcast who must flee for his life. Ralph is an idealist and a dreamer. He needs Piggy to think for him. He finds the Conch but Piggy tells him how to use it. At the end of the book, he is a disillusioned realist who now sees his world and its inhabitants for what they are. JACK MERRIDEW Does he represent the worst in people? He is thin, tall, with red hair, light blue eyes and freckles. Leader of the choir, he becomes the leader of the hunters. Increasingly in conflict with Ralph and more particularly, Piggy, he breaks away, forms his own tribe and splits the group. He manages to get the support to do this by offering the boys the attraction of the hunting life and then by terrorising them. In the...
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...become sad and depressed and shut out the world. The Lord of the Flies is a novel about a group of boys that are in a plane crash and became stranded on an island. The boys are forced to adapt to their environment and struggle to survive and in the process, several of the boys are lost. Simon’s death is the most important event in the Lord of the Flies because it leads to character development in Ralph and Jack, it also emphasizes the depravity of man. Simon’s death is the most important event because it is a significant event in the plot that adds to themes and helps character's develop. Simon’s death is the arrival of evil on the island within the boys, this is where they begin to realize they are becoming mad. After Simon was killed on the stormy night down on the beach the...
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...Trinity Lloyd Brady, K ENG 2D0 Thursday, December 17, 2015 Identity Crisis Your identity is what makes you the way you are. When you lose sight of your identity your beliefs and expressions are clouded, and insanity follows suit. In William Golding’s award winning novel Lord of the Flies this is revealed to the audience through multiple examples. The loss of your own identity can lead to insanity due to losing your physical identity, integrity, and accepting your true form, which Golding tells us, is insanity and savagery. To adapt to your surroundings, people usually alter or strip away their physical identity. For instance, clothes held the boys on the island to their physical identity, at first they kept them on to avoid getting sunburnt, but when they adapted to their surroundings, they strip away their clothes becoming slightly less civilized, the book states, “He [Ralph] undid the snake-clasp of his belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood their naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water” (Golding5). In society, rules were against stripping down, but since there was no authority on the island, Ralph sees no need to keep on the clothes he wore in civilization. In addition, Piggy’s glasses symbolize knowledge and reason. Physically the glasses are meant for vision, vision means sight, and sight is a metaphor for knowledge. When the glasses are broken, they are misused, no longer a symbol for knowledge and reason. “The chief led them, trotting steadily...
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...In society today, one barely has any time to take care of one’s children. They are left alone and uncared for which often causes them to either react badly in every day life or to become accustomed to their solitude and learn to fend for themselves. Such realities can also be portrayed in works of fiction such as The Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies, two stories that may seem very different in content, but are based on very similar ideas. In these two stories, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Lord of the Flies by William Golding, there are two main characters by the names of Katniss and Ralph who both go through their life journeys isolated from society and in each story, their situations becomes a disadvantage for them. Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games are novels that portray an abuse of power as a result of leadership roles in society, an absence of identity used as camouflage, and finally, a loss of innocence among the characters as a result of living in a corrupted and chaotic environment. In both stories, there is an abuse of power, which destroys the main characters’ lives. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, once Jack had decided to run the island the way he sees fit, things started to go downhill for Ralph. When Ralph was chief of the island, the children tried to stay as civilized as they could, and even started establishing rules and tasks for each person to accomplish. When Jack started to take control of the island, however, everything was completely ruined...
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...Dystopia ≠ Utopia A dystopia is a fictional society, usually portrayed as existing in a future time, where the conditions of life are extremely bad due to oppression, or terror. Science fiction (particularly post-apocalyptic science fiction and cyberpunk stories set in an imaginary future world controlled by technology and computers) often feature dystopias. Common traits of Dystopian fiction: The setting is the future, but often with contemporary social trends taken to extremes incorporated on purpose. A hierarchical society where there are unbending and definitive divisions between the upper, middle and lower class Society is conditioned to fear the outside world, and one of the methods for achieving this is the restriction of information and freedom. A corrupt authoritarian and totalitarian government creates or sustains the poor quality of life This government makes people believe that society is proper and just, even perfect. State propaganda makes citizens worship the state the leader of the state and the government. There is strict conformity among citizens and the general assumption that having opinions and individuality is bad The penal system often employs psychological or physical torture Violence, cruelty and aggressiveness are always present. Dystopias are frequently written as warnings, or as social satire, criticizing a current trend, norm or political system. In order for the dystopia to have an effect on the reader, the author uses characteristics...
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...inspire awe. The boys attempt to establish order on the island by electing Ralph as the leader. Rather than running around and accomplishing nothing, the boys are now able to achieve goals on the path to being rescued. With Ralph as a leader, the boys now behave in an orderly fashion. Chapters 3-7: Paradise Lost Due to an earlier failed hunting attempt, Jack is shown to be extremely determined to kill a pig in this passage. Fulfilling his earlier vow of “no mercy”, Jack employs detailed techniques to track a pig. Through explaining Jack’s hunt, Golding describes Jack’s first steps of descending into savagery. Piggy’s glasses and the fire symbolize the boys’ desire to be rescued. When Jack breaks them, the instance exemplifies the beginning of Jack losing a desire to be rescued. This part of the story also conveys Jack’s disregard for Piggy, who practically destroyed half Piggy’s sight, which the glasses provide. Ralph and Piggy focus on keeping the group together and being rescued while Jack cares only about hunting. As Jack’s passion for hunting consumes him, Ralph and Piggy are frustrated due to his lack of any work outside of hunting. In addition, Jack could cause division within the group by persuading his hunters to follow his path rather than Ralph’s. The conch represents law and order within the group. While the conch is not of significance to boys such as the hunters, Piggy values what the conch represents. Throughout the story, Piggy attempts to keep the group under control...
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...Hundreds of thousand of children have been forced to become child soldiers. A Long Way Gone and Lord of the Flies both share an essence of innocence that they are forced to let go of. A Long Way Gone portrait Ishmael Beah’s young life in Africa as a child soldier. Ishmael, while away from his village he learns it had been attacked by rebels and cannot return home. When the rebels arrive at the village Ismael has been staying in, he and manages to evade the rebels but must be nomadic. However, when he seems to find peace in a military occupied village, the rebels arrive and Ismael joins the fight to protect himself, becoming a child soldier. After a couple more battles UNICEF comes to take the boys to Freetown in order to be rehabilitated and educated. Esther serves as a role model for...
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...In this competitive era, everyone is eager to gain something. Positive attitude on satisfying desire can push one to achieve one’s dream, while radical and unsatisfied desire will ruin one’s humanity and take away one’s reason. “a contented mind is a continual feast” is a good suggestion about how to control ambitious. In Lord of the flies, it is their different attitudes toward how to satisfy their desire make them have different fates. Field Marshal said, “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.” When you set the fire of kind desire for power, your weapon is a shield, which protects your followers and saves your conscience. In an opposite way, the weapon can be a spear, which not only hurts followers but also spears you. In Lord of the Flies, the desire for power breaks boys’ brittle civilization, causes conflict and competition, and finally devastates the island. Jack, an aggressive and ambitious boy, is novel’s primary representative of primitive, instinctual savagery and the desire of power. In the beginning of chapter 2, Ralph encourages boys to vote for a chief, he [Ralph] lifted the conch. “Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things.” “A chief! A chief!” “I ought to be chief,” said Jack with simple arrogance, "because I'm chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp."(22) Jack thinks there’s no doubt that he should hold the power because he gets used to being the top one in a group. However, he fails to be elected. Since then, the...
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...Hamlet and Lord of flies essay. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy,” is a strong quote by Martin Luther King Jr which is a statement that I think is true. A man cannot be judged on his actions when he is comfortable, but when he is going through challenges and hardship. Literary work that shows this is true is in the book Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the character Hamlet is found in conflicts and dilemmas that he cannot solve. This quote is also true in Lord of the flies by the character Ralph who tries to find out who the beast is but cannot see that it is the savagery between the boys on the Island and the character piggy...
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...Innate evil resides in all humans no matter age, gender, race or religion. Evil within us since our birth and will stay with us until the day we die. William Golding’s Lord of the flies has a great depiction what happens to a group of boy’s transformation to savagery and how they are able to release their inner evils when exposed to a certain environment or situation. Cut off from the outside world and trapped on an island, the boys, once civilized and innocent begin perform more savage actions in order to survive, increasing their hostility towards others showing that all humans are plagued with a natural evil. By examining the death of the two boys, Jack’s role of the hunter (and how this has driven him to savagery) and the lord of the flies (also known as the beast), we can...
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...Jack was a major symbol in Lord of the Flies," representing the rapid change between civilized and savage. At the beginning of the book, he well showed obedience towards those higher up on the social totem pole than him. Few times did he resist authority and challenge society. However, his human behavior started to slowly creep out of him, becoming more and more apparent by the chapter. Rapidly his savagery came out later in the book, showing just how easy it is for a boy of a world power civilization can fall to the extremities of full blown radicalism towards a productive society. After the plane crash landed, Jack had behavior similar to that of any teenage boy of his time period, expressing his opinion brashly yet still making reasonable...
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...with the consequences and hurting the ones they love. When one fail's to accept responsibility for their actions there are a series of events that follow through. For example, in Lord of the Flies Jack did not...
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...****Take note of points 2 and 6**** Title: Good grief: Lord of the Flies as a post-war rewriting of salvation history Author: Marijke van Vuuren 1. Introduction "It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding," said King Carl XVI Gustaf, presenting William Golding with the Nobel Prize in 1983. "I had to do Lord of the Flies at school" (Monteith, 1986:63). The Swedish king's words may well be echoed by countless people worldwide who have "had to do" Golding's first novel in various English courses. Indeed, this "unpleasant novel about small boys behaving unspeakably on a desert island" (1) may well have been done to death by exhaustive but reductive reading and teaching. Where Lord of the Flies has been read reductively, Original Sin writ large over it, readers have tended to respond to the novel in terms of its doleful view of humanity or its perceived theology. Its initial success reflected post-war pessimism, the loss of what Golding (1988a:163) has called his generation's "liberal and naive belief in the perfectability of man". Although the novel does not groan under a dogmatic burden to the extent that some critics have alleged, it has seemed the prime example of Golding's earlier writing, a tightly structured allegory or fable. … It is not surprising that the Bible's first and last books, on humankind's "origins and end" beyond the horizons of knowledge, turn to symbolic narrative. In Lord of the Flies Golding draws heavily on imagery from Genesis and the Apocalypse...
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...electrical shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch…” (Schwartz 2). This shows that when people are put in their position of power, even for a short time people can become savage. The test subjects were put under strenuous situations, and it caused them to show their true colors. More than half of the subjects would have killed someone if the professor had told them to. This shows that the power clouds the judgement of many people. This is the process of putting the good apples in a bad barrel. This same idea is shown by Golding when Rodger murders Piggy. In this case the metaphorical barrel is the island. In this scenario, the boys have divided the island in half. Jack has split off with his new tribe, they come and steal Piggy’s specs that are used for the fire. Jack and Piggy both decide to do something about it. They go to meet Jack on “castle rock” in the area of Jack’s tribe. The meeting gets out of control and Piggy starts frantically screaming about the conch, at this point Rodger was away from all of the commotion, he feels “a sense of...
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...things 'ud be all right-", the use of tea whilst describing the adults show that Piggy thinks that adults are a sign of civilisation. This shows us that Piggy believes that freedom isn't a good thing and that the boys cannot be trusted with it, Piggy likes the rules and order of civilisation and this is what stops him from being a savage. This also leads onto the fact that Piggy is constantly excluded, Piggy does not want the power, he just wants to be heard but he is a follower. Piggy does not have to need to control and this also stops him from becoming a savage. The boys want to act as adults and be the ones to take away each other's freedom, however their naivety means that they are bad leaders and they resort to savagery instead. Piggy's lack of drive for power...
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