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Lord Of The Flies Piggy Essay

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Humans can be very strange and sometimes cruel. This is illustrated perfectly in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a story about a group of boys that are stranded on an isolated island. In the boys’ attempt to survive and be rescued, their animal natures get the best of them. Chaos ensues, resulting in the deaths of two boys as well as countless injuries. Throughout the story there is one boy, however, that remains rational and keeps his head. That character is Piggy. Piggy is fat, and this makes him the subject of physical abuse because of limited mobility as well as asthma. He is also subject to verbal abuse such as his nickname “Piggy” and whenever he reminds the others about his asthma, they give him the invariable reply “Sucks to …show more content…

When Ralph and some other boys are out hunting for meat, it begins to get dark. Ralph wants to go back to camp rather than risk going back in the dark, but the others want to stay out and tell him he's being like Piggy and spoiling all the fun. The boys are abusive of Piggy throughout the story, but what they don’t realize is that they depend on him for their survival. He keeps Ralph and several other leader boys sane, who in turn help keep everyone sane. They also depend on him because of his glasses, which they need to make fires. The abuse gets worse as the story progresses, finally ending in one of the boys killing Piggy by rolling a boulder off a cliff and onto him. This happens when he is trying to talk sense into the boys. He says: “Which is better, law and rescue or hunting and breaking things up?” [214] The rock is dropped right after this. Piggy is a good example of a typical nerd. He is physically challenged and has more intelligence than any other boy. Throughout the thunderstorm of a plot, he is the grounding wire that keeps most of the group alive. One of the strangest parts of Lord of the Flies is how despite the boys’ dependance on Piggy, they treat him like a pariah to be despised and

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