Lord Of The Flies Critical Lens

In Lord of the Flies by John Steinback a group of young boys are stranded on an island. To survive the boys decided to vote who should be their leader, Ralph or Jack. Piggy is a smart, fat boy who is not respected by the boys. Ralph is the face of leadership but not the best for the job compared to Piggy. Piggy is the brains behind Ralph who gives the essential idea to further progress the island.

“In a 2005 survey about gay bullying statistics, teens reported that the number two reason they are bullied is because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender expression”, according to bullyingstatistics.org. It has also been shown that those who are bullied themselves often go on to bully others because it is all they know, or that bullying covers up their own shames. The character Jack Merridew in Lord of the Flies is not evil like many would argue, but rather is ashamed of the fact that he is gay and closeted. This is supported by the hunter’s casting off of religion and government, Jack’s inability to hunt unless in front of other boys, and the beast as a symbol.

No one would think kids could turn to cruelty, but in this book, you can see how human nature turns people against each other. Not all the boys turned to savages, but there were times when there actions were questionable. Take Ralph for example, he was probably one of the least barbaric of them all, yet he still joined in on the murder of Simon. While most boys were oblivious to their descent into savagery, people like Ralph realized this ongoing turn, “I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home, Oh God, I want to go home” (Golding 157). The boys change into savagery was not gradual, and even some of the boys, such as Ralph or Simon, noticed this trend, and as young boys it frightened them to realize the fact that they were altering towards inhumanity. As well, the book represents that evil is in all of us. The Beast, which was the main source of evil in the book, was not real. It was only a figment of the boys’ imaginations. While the Beast wasn’t a physical thing it represented

“When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed”(Rand). This was stated by Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand; the extract relates to the novel William Golding wrote called Lord of the Flies. Golding wrote about a group of schoolboys trapped on an island from a plane crash. The boys had to figure out how to survive without grownups. Trying to survive was difficult because they had to have common sense and order. They lose those traits throughout the book which resulted in selfishness and corrupt behaviors.

What went wrong in the Lord of the Flies? Some may say Jack and some may say Roger, but what are the real reasons for the downfall of the boys? They are, the loss of hope, the loss of order, and the passing of time.

“We all have a social mask, right? We put it on, we go out, put our best foot forward, our best image. But behind that social mask is a personal truth, what we really, really believe about who we are and what we 're capable of” (Phil McGraw) one once said. In Lord of the Flies the characters wear a social mask that opposes their true feelings. Written by William Golding, the story revolves around a group of boys who become stranded on an island and must depend on themselves to survive. They elect a chief, a boy named Ralph. However, as the story progresses, the group become influenced by Jack, an arrogant choir chapter boy. Intriguingly, although they desire to be with Jack and join his tribe, the boys remain with Ralph for most of the story. The rhetorical triangle, which analyzes a speaker or writer based on three ideas- ethos, pathos, and logos-, helps many to better understand the children’s actions and mentality; ethos focuses on the credibility and ethics of the speaker while pathos concerns how the speaker appeals to the emotions of the audience and logos is about the speaker’s use of evidence to appeal to the audience’s sense of reason. The boys stay with Ralph because of Ralph’s use of ethos but prefer to be with Jack because of Jack’s use of pathos and ethos which shows Golding’s message- humans were masks.

When people are little kids, it is easy for them to feed into their fears and become dependent on adults for comfort. As adults, people usually conceal their fears and try to keep a clear mindset so unnecessary issues do not occur. In Stephen King’s adaptation The Mist and William Golding’s novel The Lord of The Flies, adults and children are pulled into their fears and eventually feed into them. In The Lord of The Flies, a plane full of British boys crashes on a deserted island with no adults in sight. The boys slowly turn on each other and, due to a mysterious beast, they are consumed by fear and behave irrationally. In The Mist, a fog rolls through town with unknown creatures lurking inside and people are terrified. The town’s citizens are trapped inside a grocery store, and when they want to go out, death has it’s doors open and waiting. Slowly, the people inside start to lose human decency toward each other and chaos breaks out. In both of these stories, people are controlled by fear, have no concept of law and order, and turn a blind eye to logic.

Children all fear the dark because of what it may contain as darkness the the manifestation of the unknown. Many people fear the unknown rather than embrace it because fearing the unknown provides them with a sense of control regardless of whether or not it is an illusion. This is shown in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, with Jack who uses the concept of the Beast to gain support from the littluns and eventually rises to power within the group of boys.

To begin with, the death of Simon in Lord of the Flies illustrates innate human evil. Simon's death is preceded by Jack's tribe singing a savage chant. They violently murder Simon, mistaking him as the beast. Children's instantaneous instincts drove them to kill Simon. Engaging in an unplanned murder, these children effectively demonstrate that when they relinquish rationale which is a product of civilization, impulses lead them to act savagely. What is also significant in this scene is that Ralph and Piggy, the two characters mainly portrayed as being rational, join the cruel murder and even begin to express instinctive behavior from their inner self. It is irrational for any person and especially children, to commit murder. Therefore,

Lord of the Flies is a novel written by William Golding. It is about british schoolboys who are stranded on an island after their plane is shot down. They are on the island with no adult supervision. Their group is civilized but turns to savagery. In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses the characters of Ralph, Jack, and Roger to symbolize that there are violence, evil, savagery, and good that exist in every society.

Although many things are stated outright in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the book is rich with symbolism and subtext. The story starts with British school boys being stranded on an island after escaping a threat of nuclear war. The boys elect fair-haired Ralph as their leader, but Jack, a fiery choirmaster of some of the boys, is jealous and the story quickly goes downhill from there, leading to aggression, mayhem, and murder. Throughout the novel, there is also a mysterious and imaginary beast that haunts the minds of the younger boys. Lord of the Flies has many details, many of which are symbols or have implied meaning. One of the most important examples of subtext is Simon, the strange, ethereal boy who aligns himself with

The loss of innocence is a central theme in this allegorical novel set in the 1940s war-ridden Earth. This novel entitled Lord of the Flies was written by British author William Golding and was published in 1954. His work turned out to be an instant classic with its humbling, powerful theme and hard-hitting, creative use of literary devices. The use of the loss of innocence as a theme is extremely impactful and leaves a lasting mark on the reader with its tale of young elementary schoolchildren driven to murder as they are stuck on an isolated island with no one who has the slightest clue as to their whereabouts. To illustrate his theme of the loss of innocence, Golding uses symbolism, allusion, and imagery to paint the dark, depressing tones found in Lord of the Flies.

Due to the continuing corruption of their civilization, the boys become more violent and barbaric, similar to Jack at the beginning of the story. His strange pleasure in killing steadily grows until it becomes chaotically out of hand as he begins hunting for the pigs “dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours” (48). He tells himself that that they need the meat, when in reality, food is not as issue on the island. Still, he believes hunting is more important than keeping the fire going. He revolts against Ralph’s ideas of civility. He and the choir boys left the fire unattended to “kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in,” but little did Jack know that this mistake caused them to miss an opportunity of being rescued (75). Soon after, the peak of the chaos occurs. Jack throws a feast that ends in the brutal murder of Simon. Jack and his men rationalize this act by saying the beast disguised himself in an attempt to alleviate their guilt. On other occasions as leader, Jack demands Samneric to join his tribe, like a tyrant, and tortures them as well as anyone who dares crossing him. Toward the end of the book he viciously plans on murdering Ralph and posting his head onto a stick and into the ground. Through each of these instances, Jack symbolizes the violence, savagery, and chaos of the society over time as their tribe falls into an immoral, wild

Another conflict between Jack and Ralph was Jack's obsession with the pig. After finally killing the pig, “His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink” (Golding 59). After killing the pig, Jack felt a power that he had been waiting for since Ralph was nominated tribe leader in the beginning of the novel. This only made him more power hungry, chaotic and savage. Once realizing this shift of thought from civilized to chaos, Ralph blew in the conch to signal a tribe meeting. He attempted to restore order and regain control, but it did not work, for the boys savage behavior became more apparent after the murder of the pig and the savage boys no longer obeyed Ralphs

A saying that is used throughout the Norton Marching Band is “everybody all of the time,” which is to say if one person messes up once that causes more problems than just their own one mistake. If one was to miss one day of rehearsal there would be a hole and another individual would miss their dots because they had no one to guide off of. Golding believed that “everybody all of the time” was true in the sense of society. In his novel Lord Of The Flies Piggy, Ralph, and Jack have failures during the novel that cause other mistakes to be more significant. Proving that society fails due to the failure of the individual.