Lord of the Flies: Literary Elements
Symbolisms
Scar: imperfection. The island could be a Utopia, but the scar tells the reader the island is flawed.
Conch: order. The conch is used to call the boys to get themselves organized. Its possession: authority. The Individual who holds the shell has the right to speak.
Fire: spirit of civilization that must be constantly fed
Piggy’s glasses: government and political vision (created the spirit of civilization) Simon’s butterflies: innocence of childhood
Title of the novel: (translation of Beelzebub) the latent evil that is within each of us, but is kept in check by reason and social pressure (civilization). In the absence of these controls, barbarism erupts.
Pig’s head: stark reality of
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Explains the fearlessness on the island when the boys loose their identities behind masks.
C. “Piggy and Ralph found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society.” Ralph and Piggy want to be part of “the tribe.” Need to belong has superseded the spirit of civilization, the need for order. Piggy and Ralph are victims of peer pressure. It is no longer safe to be outside the tribe. It is no longer safe to have individual thoughts; the tribe functions as a single entity.
D. “We tried to keep the fire going, but we couldn’t.” Ralph. The boys were unable to keep the spirit of civilization alive. They allowed the beast to take over. The spirit of civilization is replaced by savagery. The hope of rescue very apparent at the beginning of the novel dies as the fire dies.
E. “Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively.” If Ralph, Piggy, Sam and Eric admit that they were involved in the dance, they will admit they were involved in the murder of Simon. Example of their childish denial of their involvement of savage events. If they admit they were involved, the event becomes very real. {Irony: they remembered something they “hadn’t done.”}
F. “Fancy thinking the beast was something you could kill.” The pig’s head is speaking to Simon while he is in one of his “fits.” The head reveals that the beast isn’t a thing or an animal, that it is actually part of the boys. The “beast” can’t be killed
Thesis: Three essential symbols that have a negative impact on the story are the conch, Piggy’s eyeglasses and the impaled pigs head.
Moreover, The plot structure in Chapter 4 is still at the rising action. The rising action in a story is a series of incidents that create suspense, interest, and even tension. And this suspense, interest, and tension are seen in Chapter 4, when order is getting lost and as a result chaos is developing between the characters. Therefore, making them less united. For example, chaos is seen between Ralph and Jack. Ralph gets mad at Jack because Jack took the hunters, who were supposed to keep the fire going, to hunt with him. But they left the signal fire unattended and as a result the fire goes out. And if the fire had not gone out, the fire would have been seen by the ship and resulted in the boys being rescued.
In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of British boys suddenly become stranded on an island, all alone, forced to form their own social system. Throughout the novel, William Golding reveals his main character 's strengths and weaknesses in their attempts to lead. The character Piggy demonstrates the benefits and limits of intelligence in maintaining civil order.
In the beginning of the Lord of the Flies we are introduced to two young boys, who have survived a tragic plane crash. The aircraft was an evacuation plane and it was transporting the group of boys out of England. One of the boys named Piggy is trying to catch up to the other boy, Ralph. Piggy is described as being very fat and shorter than Ralph. He wears “thick spectacles” (William Golding 7) and he is the first to determine that they are on an island. Piggy is also the one that knows how to use the conch shell and comes up with the use of it, which is to call everyone else to the beach. He believed the conch created order. Once the conch had been used we are introduced to more boys and they gain interest in Piggy’s glasses. They discover that Piggy’s glasses can start fires and they refer to them as “burning glasses” (Golding 40). The boys also rejoiced when they discovered that his glasses could create the fires. They proclaimed, “His specs - use them as burning glasses!” (Golding 38). The spectacles symbolize Piggy’s intelligence, which distinguished him from the others. Without the glasses Piggy would be blind and he would not know what to do. Although Piggy is portrayed as being physically weak and not having a great chance at survival, he is the only one that seemed to know a few survival skills. He is the one that created the fire, sundial and shelter. Without his glasses he would not be ‘intelligent’. His appearance and personality cause him to be shunned
Lord of the Flies has been considered a literary classic throughout many generations, in spite of it’s perplexing and depressing aspects. Written in 1954 with the timeframe of the next world war, a novel such as this is bound to have some out-dated concepts,language, and elements. The characters are a great example of this.
The naval officer took all the boys that were on the island to the ship. One by one they got on the ship and sat down quietly. Most of them thought about the things that happen on the island like what happen to Piggy and Simon and the littlun with a mulberry-colored mark on his face. Others thought about what they were going to do when they got home with their families and how their families were going to react. Ralph thought about his friend, Piggy, and how he got killed. Jack thought about his mom and what would happen if she knew what he did on the island. Everyone’s faces seemed shocked by the news that they were rescued. Ralph seem like he wanted to say something, but he was too shocked to even say a word. The naval officer asked the littluns what their name was but some of them did not even remember their names not even Percival.
Humans develop in societies with rules, order and government, but humans are not perfect, they have many deficiencies so do the societies they live in. When a group of schoolboys land on a tropical island, Ralph takes on the role of leader by bringing all of the boys together and organizing them. He first explains “There aren’t any grownups. We shall have to look after ourselves.”(p.33), this brings up the question if the boys will have prosperity or will they succumb to the evil on the island. At first the young boys start being successful and civilized, but chaos soon overruns them and evil starts to lurk over the island.The fictional story of the group of British schoolboys stranded on an island and the decisions they make, relates back
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.
Without Piggy’s horrible eye sight, and him needing to wear glasses, the boys would never have been able to start a fire, a fire that ultimately led to their rescue. This is very ironic considering Piggy was killed before he would ever see rescue… a rescue that without him would never have happened. Golding did this to reinforce the importance of Piggy in the novel. It showed that no matter how useless he may have seemed, he still was the one that helped the most, in the long run. He was the most important boy to be on that island. He, in reality, saved Jack, an abusive boy who harassed him ever since they crashed, and Roger, the boy who threw stones, and the boy who murdered the innocent Piggy. “Though Piggy reaches his greatest stature at the moment of his death, it is also the moment of his greatest blindness, rendered for us at a level far deeper than his lost spectacles”. (Kinead-Weekes. Mark. 43). Piggy was completely blindsided from Rogers’s boulder. This moment in the novel makes readers realize the tragedy of Piggy’s death. The shattering of the glasses represents his knowledge and insight turning to dust, all in front of the very people he saves, from the cage that is the island. The conch was also with him at the moment of his death. This is significant because it symbolizes the shattering of all that Piggy believed in. He truly believed the conch would save him from anything on the island, and in the end it simply did not
The narrator shows how Piggy wants the boys to be involved in their government ideas with quotes like,“I take the conch to say that I can’t see without my glasses and I have to get them back” (192). Piggy’s glasses represent intelligence
At this point in the novel, Piggy’s glasses, in the boys’ eyes, are seen as the most valuable object on the island, not the conch, which originally represented power and law and order to the young boys. When Jack and his group succeed in stealing the broken glasses, it reveals how much they are spiralling more into savagery as they leave humanity behind. By them stealing Piggy’s glasses Jack is hoping to give him and his group the power and control and leave the others weak and pathetic. They are also hoping that as they have possession of the glasses it will give them more of a chance of surviving on the island.
The conch signifies law and civilization. Piggy tells Ralph, “We can use this to call the others. Have a meeting. They’ll come when they hear us” (16). As seen in this quote, the conch was used to bring all the boys together, and this shows civilization. The conch brought together the boys which are soon established into their own little civilization. A few chapters into the book, the conch is seen being handed around to those who wanted to speak. This is supported by the quote, “That’s what this shell’s called. I’ll give the conch to the next person to speak” (33).
They are needed for a fire and for Piggy to see. “They’ve got our fire. They stole it. They blinded me.” (Golding 132) When jack and his hunters steal Piggy’s glasses which are half broke, Piggy tries to go to find them and take them back from jack. But this leads to Piggy’s death. Because when a rock that piggy cannot see hits him, he dies. “ The rock struck piggy with a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand fragments and ceased to exist.” (Golding 141). Moreover, when piggy dies the conch dissipates. Which is another symbol that in this situation it symbolises the loss of civilization and
The boys project their irrational fears as a derivative of their immaturity, in an attempt to identify a realized external enemy. Literary critic Lawrence S. Friedman explains, “Too immature to account for the enemy within, the boys project their irrational fears onto the outside world. The first of these projections takes the shape of a snakelike “beastie,” the product of a small boy’s nightmare.” (233) The boys’ irrational fear of the unknown, one of a small boy’s nightmare, only serves to exemplify their immaturity in handling situations like this. It is a stepping stone to events to come, prophesied by Simon. In addition, the character of Simon alludes to the fact that there evil ‘beast’ can really be traced to their internalized innate evilness. Simon argues, “maybe there is a beast… What I mean is… maybe it’s only us.” (Golding 89) While all of the boys attempt to explain the phenomena of the ‘beast,’ Simon is the one who realizes that the boys themselves are the evil ‘beast’ they perceive. There is no external force, the ‘beast’ only serves to be a placeholder for the boys’ true primal nature. However, it is Simon’s death, at the hand of the boys themselves, that only serves to prove that evil truly exists in all of these boys. Friedman suggests, “The ritual murder of Simon is as ironic as it is inevitable. Ironically, he is killed as the beast before he can explain that the beast does not exist. His horrid death refutes is aborted revelation: the beast exists, all right, not where we thought to find it, but within ourselves.” (236) His death is truly the tipping point, a point of no return for the boys. After his killing, Simon’s philosophy of inner evil is realized. It is clear that his own philosophy is what ultimately leads to Simon’s death, as unfortunate as it may be. It is reflected of the group’s fear of the unknown, and their
Lord of the Flies by Stephen Krashen portrays the events the of young boys who get stranded on a desert island after their plane crashes. It is infamous for showing how most of those boys manifest into “savages”, Krashen showed this by adding spears and face paint as a crude applicant to their ensemble, and they start investing their time into murderous shenanigans. However, how did they become such feral barbarians in contrast to the refined choir boys they were in England? After all, at first, they had a chief, fruit, a bath and a conch that allowed them to call meetings. Those meetings were set in place to keep their lives in order and were working for quite a while. The boys built shelters,