Survival of the fittest is just something that people joke about, or use to make an entertaining TV show, but what if survival of the fittest could be seen throughout a culture? In the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding, he shows how survival of the fittest could happen to young boys. The boys see the island as a fun experience because there are no grownups on the island, and they are between the age of 6-13. Since the boys are isolated by themselves, there ideals of survival are shown easily as older mentors are not their to correct their behaviors. The relationship between survival of the fittest and savagery is represented by Ralph and Jack, as they have opposing viewpoints on how to find help and survive the days on the island. …show more content…
For the first few chapters of Lord of the Flies, Jack is attracted to hunting on the island for the benefit of all the boys,”’All the same you need an army for hunting pigs-’”(32). Jack tells the reader through this line that hunting can bring one of the necessities needed for all the boys to survive, which would be food. During this early meeting discussing how the boys will survive, Jack wants to help showing early on how he is an ally to the whole group of boys and is one of the most productive out of the group by his hunting ideals. This helpful hunting doesn’t last for long though, as Jack starts to change his intention for his hunting. Later on in the book Jack shows his intention for hunting to be more savage and for the thrill of the hunt rather than survival,”She [the pig] blundered into a tree, forcing a spear still deeper; and after that, any of the hunters could follow her easily by the drops of vivid blood” (135). This vivid image shows Jack’s idea of survival to be brutal and savage rather than humane like the other leader of the island, Ralph. Soon enough this thrill of the hunt becomes addicting and his idea is to eliminate everyone who is not on his side, like Ralph; this becomes a game as Jack and his wild group try to kill Ralph and chase him towards the end of the island. This hunting game Jack created shows his ideas on survival and how the more savage you are the better you are off; this savage idea is the complete opposite of Ralph's, which focuses on being humane and trying to create a civilized
In “Lord of the Flies” Ralph has the goal of getting himself and the rest of the tribe off the island. His plan to execute it is by making a signal fire that a passing ship or boat will see to rescue them. Ralph realizes that maintaining order within their tribe is crucial to their survival and chance of being saved. As chief of their group, he assigns Jack the leader of the hunters. He then puts them in charge of keeping the signal fire lit. During this process, Jack and his boys get distracted from keeping it lit as they attempt to kill a pig. After a couple of hunts, Jack and his boys finally kill a pig and return in cheers. As they get back, Ralph gets mad at Jack saying “You and your blood Jack Merridew! You and your hunting! We might have gone home” (70). Ralph is angry with Jack because he realizes as leader that he has to make sure everyone understands their main goal, and are able to focus on that by blocking out distractions. These actions that Ralph show display why he is successful as a leader and why they accomplish the goal of getting
Golding's Lord of the Flies is highly demonstrative of Golding's opinion that society is a thin and fragile veil that when removed shows man for what he truly is, a savage animal. Perhaps the best demonstration of this given by Golding is Jack's progression to the killing of the sow. Upon first landing on the island Jack, Ralph, and Simon go to survey their new home. Along the way the boys have their first encounter with the island's pigs. They see a piglet caught in some of the plants. Quickly Jack draws his knife so as to kill the piglet. Instead of completing the act, however, Jack hesitates. Golding states that, "The pause was only long enough for them to realize the enormity of what the downward stroke would be." Golding is suggesting that the societal taboos placed on killing are still ingrained within Jack. The next significant encounter in Jack's progression is his first killing of a pig. There is a description of a great celebration. The boys chant "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood." It is clear from Golding's description of the revelry that followed the killing that the act of the hunt provided the boys with more than food. The action of killing another living thing gives them pleasure. The last stage in Jack's metamorphosis is demonstrated by the murder of the sow. Golding describes the killing almost as a rape. He says, "Jack was on...
In the novel, “The Lord of the Flies”, the reader can see the change in Jack’s character as his obsession to hunt grows. As the leader, Ralph gives Jack and his choirboys the responsibility to hunt for food for the rest of the group. We see that in Jack’s first attempt to hunt, civilisation is holding him back so he does not hold the ability to slaughter the pig. This is shown where it says, “They knew very well why he hadn’t: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh, because of the unbearable blood.”. However, we see that his nature changes and soon his preoccupation with hunting increases dramatically. At the beginning of Chapter three, Golding portrays Jack to have animal-like traits such as “flared nostrils” and describes him as “dog-like” and “ape-like”. It can therefore be interpreted that Jac...
Incredibly, throughout the entirety of the book, Golding uses irony to compare the boy’s on the island to the adults at war in the outside world. Jack arrived on the island with a sense of superiority saying that “after all, we're not savages. We're English; and the English are best at everything. So we've got to do the right things (The lord of the Flies pg. 42).” Then Jack turns right around and his first step toward a savage lifestyle was painting up his face with mud and dirt to put on a mask before he goes hunting. At the end of the book Jack is so far gone that he hunts another boy. He plans on placing Ralph’s head on a stick in order to get a message across- you’re either with me or against me. Jack is the same one who goes to steal
Jack is made the leader of the hunting tribe. He and his hunters have much trouble trying to hunt and kill a pig. Since he was raised as part of a sophisticated and wealthy family in England, he has not had any experience with hunting before. He struggles to become a hunter. But Jack is shown to have savage urges early. The author says, "he [Jack] tried to convey the...
The novel Lord of the Flies was full of challenges that the boys overcame in order to survive. Conflicts within themselves, with nature and with each other constantly test the children’s ability to endure. Struggles against the natural elements of the island, rival groups or fear of the unknown continually appear throughout the story. Some of the boys on the island did not survive the quarrels that they faced. They perished because they were lacking something that the surviving boys did not. The survivors had a natural primal instinct or a physical or mental advantage over the boys who did not make it. ‘Only the strong survive’ is an important element that runs through the novel Lord of the Flies because in order to survive the boys must turn to their primitive instincts of physical strength and savagery.
Jack’s totalitarian ideals meant that due to his wild rampage of death and destruction, his bloodlust made him descend into savagery. His eventual fall into savagery begins with the sighting of a wild pig. He is fascinated but cannot bring himself to kill it due to “the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood”. This shows his innocence at the start of the novel, but his lust for blood soon overcomes the battle against his inner self. “He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up.” When he first killed the pig, Jack is ecstatic. Killing becomes an obsession to him. “His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them
William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, is the perfect allegory to man’s inherent evilness. A group of boys, British students, comprised of children who are approximately in their middle childhood gets marooned on a desert island somewhere in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean after their plane crashed. The boys are the only survivors. Except for a musical choir, led by a certain Jack Merridew, the boys have never met each other and have no established leadership. “The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state” (Lord of the Flies).
While the boys are on the island, they become more inhumane. Jack’s job is to hunt, strictly for the purpose of bringing back food. As the story progresses, however, hunting becomes more of a way to show his power ad violent ways than a way to find food necessary for the group. Jack said to “kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood” (Golding 69). This quote shows how violent Jack is becoming and the progression of hunting being a way to supply food, to a quest for blood.
In William Golding's Lord of the Flies a group of kids who are fleeing a war, plane crashes and they are stranded on a deserted island without Adult supervision. The first thing all the kids do is vote for a chief and Ralph, who is more responsible, wins over Jack. They are the choices because Ralph is the Colonel of the whole group and Jack is the oldest out of all the boys. As the story goes on and when Jack starts his own group all of the kids lose sight of their main goal, to be rescued. They're all having too much fun when they switch over to Jack's group hunting and killing for food. In the story there are four main characters that are in a sense the leaders of the crew. There's Piggy and a quiet Simon who do not possess the scrappiness that Ralph and Jack do. These strengths are what help Ralph and Jack survive. Piggy is always talking about how his Auntie would not let him do this or that and Simon was just a quiet, reserved kid who is regarded as weird just due to the fact that he is calm.
The fact that Jack acts like this is very important to the story. Jack’s lust for power and blood sped the story up a lot faster. It’s possible that without Jack the boys wouldn’t even become savage. Jack is also a bully, and forces the boys out of fear into what he wants them to do. In, “The Lord of the Flies”, by William Golding, Jack is pretty much equivalent to a middle school bully, but the circumstances he is in, turns him into something even worse.
At the beginning hunting for Jack is just something to help the group survive and make sure that no one starves to death. After he kills his first pig his mentality changes he thinks that he doesn’t need the other and that hunting is his passion. He no longer cares if he gets rescued or not all he want is to kill pigs and make feasts.
Jack all along had been trying to gain control of the group of boys by appearing to be courageous and unafraid of any threats the island presented. Jack is obsessed with hunting the beast and the pigs on the island. His lust for blood is proven in the quote “Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing” (Golding 154). Jack’s savageness is shown when he cuts the pig's throat. He enjoys having the pig’s blood on him because it is described as hot blood that spouted over his hands. Jack shows that he is capable of anything. He could have killed the pig in a way that was less violent and gruesome. As the story goes on Jack reveals his true evil self through the killing of the pigs and some of the other boys on the island. The conch is the only thing preventing him from becoming a blood thirsty maniac because it represents law and order. In the quote “ We’ll have rules!’ He cried excitedly. ‘Lots of rules” (Golding 33). Jack suggests that the boys have rules in order to stay as close to civilization as possible. With society’s idea of being a good civilian Jack is not able show the evil within himself. After the conch is
“The survival of the fittest”, a theory brought forth by Charles Darwin representing that the weak will suffer and only the strong may survive. A theory that is heavily related with cruelty. Such cruelty occurred in the book Lord of the Flies where a group of children become stranded on an island after their plane crash. The book slowly splits into two paths, one leading to salvation and rescue while the second leads to the abandoning civilization and only desiring to survive for themselves. Jack, the main antagonist in Lord of the Flies, demonstrates the cruelty of the second path as he slowly corrodes the group into degenerates at his attempt to usurp power.
Jack is about Ralph's age, with a skinnier build and red hair. His freckled face is described as being "ugly without silliness." From the very beginning, he seems to harbor emotions of anger and savagery. At first, he is the leader of his choir group, who becomes hunters as the book progresses. Finally, his savage personality and ability to tell people what they want to hear allows him to overtake Ralph as chief. Jack does not believe that the Beast exists and is the leader of anarchy on the island. From the start of the novel he does not like abiding by rules of any kind. He simply wants to hunt and have a good time. Not seeming to care about being rescued, Jack and his tribe are examples of the Beast running rampant. In the beginning of the story Jack, still conditioned by the previous society he had been apart of, could not bear to kill a pig that was caught in the brush. As the plot progresses he becomes less and less attached to any societal norms.