Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a classic novel and portrays just how the society surrounding us can corrupt our once pure nature No one is born a killer, no one is born with an intense compulsion to kill, the island that the boys are stranded on has a very unusual, corrupting society; A society that erodes the boys innocence through the power struggle between Jack and Ralph, readers see the transfer from innocent to savagely through the hunting and Piggy’s death. Innocence is quickly brushed under the rug whenever the boys realize they must kill to eat, making hunting the first major cause in the conversion from good to evil. When first crashing onto the island Jack had come with a set of morals and therefore was not able to go out and kill a pig. An example of this is when he is just about to stab his first pig but, “There came a pause, a hiatus,” Jack could not bear to go through with the kill (Golding 41). Jacks pause is his conscious reminding him of his natural, personal beliefs of right and wrong. These beliefs do not, however, hold him back for long as the society he now lives in alter his previous values and morals. A majority of the boys on the island are wanting to go after the pigs for meat. Jacks major convern is to obtain meat and as Ralph is trying to convinve him to help with shelter jack says, “ We want meat” (Golding 51). Golding is making Jacks growing savage nature blatantly obvious, as he ignores the need for shelter and simply wants to go hunt down pigs. The hunt is no longer merely a source of gathering food but has transmuted into the only activity of interest and fulfillment for jack and his hunters. Now a complete savage Jack has acquired a thirst for killing and hunting. This thirst, and abso... ... middle of paper ... ...t from wrong. Along with Piggys fall goes the Conch, the biggest symbol of civilization, now a nearly innocent boy and all civilization has been lost. These deaths have been made out to be totally harmless because theres zero punishment within their society; the very society that has transformed little boys into rutheless, savages. The island on which the boys have been stranded posses an evil and corrupting society, which depletes all innocence the boys once obtained. This is a drastic transformation as now the boys are hungry to kill and do not withhold any sense of their old civilizations moral values. William Golding shows the society people are swallowed up by molds their beliefs and values through the extensive change young, innocent, boys have gone through. Works Cited Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
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...
William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of The Flies’ tells the story of a group of English boys isolated on a desert island, left to attempt to retain civilisation. In the novel, Golding shows one of the boys, Jack, to change significantly. At the beginning of the book, Jack’s character desires power and although he does not immediately get it, he retains the values of civilized behaviour. However, as the story proceeds, his character becomes more savage, leaving behind the values of society. Jack uses fear of the beast to control the other boys and he changes to become the book’s representation of savagery, violence and domination. He is first taken over with an obsession to hunt, which leads to a change in his physical appearance This change of character is significant as he leads the other boys into savagery, representing Golding’s views of there being a bad and unforgiving nature to every human.
On the other hand, Golding tries to show the evil within man through Jack. Jack is a character in which he almost symbolizes cruel political leaders, such as Castro, Hussein, Hitler, etc. He is the leader of the hunters, the first time they find a pig, Jack stops, and couldn't kill the pig. That revealed how Jack was civilized, yet later on he would kill the pig without hesitation. "'We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
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...
In the beginning of the book, the boys tried to be civil, live by rules, be peaceful to one another and follow moral commands. The conch’s literal role in the novel was to summon meetings, however there was a much deeper meaning to it. The conch represented rules, democracy and civilization and when it got crushed it was clear that all these signs had long vanished and that the boys had long lost their innocence and humanity for they were now savages. The conch was used throughout the book to establish order and all respected its authority, for only the ones who held the conch spoke during meetings. We can see from the very beginning that the conch set order, by blowing in to the conch Ralph and Piggy were able to reunite all the survivors, this straight away showed the reader how the conch held some sort of authority that throughout the book became clearer.
At the beginning of the novel, he was a proper British choir boy, but as the book progresses, Jack is subjected to a different environment, one without strong authority or structure. He goes from a society with laws, government, and strong morals, to a desert island with no adults and order at all. Due to this change, he gets increasingly violent and bloodthirsty. Experiences also helped to define Jack’s character. In the beginning, when they were first stranded on the island, Jack wasn’t able to kill a pig that was trapped in the creepers. He couldn’t do it and, “the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh,” was too much for him, (Golding 31). At first. As the book progresses his desire to kill proliferates, and soon he does. Slaughtering the pig on the island is the catalyst for him. After this Jack gets increasingly animalistic and alien, much different from the boy from before. At one point, when they are painting themselves with blood of the dead pig, “he looked in astonishment, no longer at himself, but at an awesome stranger,” (Golding 64). This demonstrates that after slaying the pig, he begins to disassociate with his past self, and see himself as a “stranger.” Jack changed because of the environment he was subjected to and the things he went through, and is no longer the proper British boy with morals and values, who would understand that murdering an innocent animal is
The book Lord of the Flies was William Golding’s first novel he had published, and also his one that is the most well known. It follows the story of a group of British schoolboys whose plane, supposedly carrying them somewhere safe to live during the vaguely mentioned war going on, crashes on the shore of a deserted island. They try to attempt to cope with their situation and govern themselves while they wait to be rescued, but they instead regress to primal instincts and the manner and mentality of humanity’s earliest societies.
When Jack first tries to kill the pig and fails, all the other boys make fun of him. This failure drives Jack into a mindless rage and further stokes his bloodlust for the pig. He becomes mindlessly obsessed with killing the pig and vows to kill it. Jack tries over and over again to kill the pig; his compulsion to track it down and kill becomes greater than ever, and “the madness came into his eyes” (Golding, 70).
At the beginning of the book, he is the one leading the choir boys, lining them up and keeping them in order. After Ralph blows the conch, the boys see the choir boys marching in two parallel lines to meet the rest of the boys (18). Jack later offers to be the hunter for their group of people. However, when they go on their trek to the top of the mountain to determine whether they are on an island, Jack finds himself presented with the opportunity to kill a pig. Though at that moment, he finds that he is unable to do so. He gets frustrated, and after that, he is so determined that he will kill a pig that getting meat is always on his mind. To do so, he “made one cheek and one eye-socket white, then he rubbed red over the other half of his face and slashed a black bar of charcoal across from right ear to left jaw” (63). This proves how much effort he is willing to put into being able to catch a pig and bringing meat for the other boys without directly being blamed for the pig’s murder. He goes so far as to paint a mask over his face, where he feels like he can do anything and not be blamed for it. We can easily tell that Jack is becoming savage, but it is confirmed when the hunters begin describing how they killed the pig: “ ‘There was lashings of blood,’ said Jack, laughing and shuddering, ‘you should have seen it!’ ” (69). He seems astonished by the fact that
Another example of bad decision making from the boys because of their extreme fear is when the society divides into two groups. Golding creates a scene where Jack attempts to scare the boys with such extreme fear, using phrases like: “The beast came out of the sea—” and “out of the dark—” and “perhaps it’s waiting—” (125,126), in order to follow him. This irrational decision that many make out of fear ends up being a harmful decision for their society. A final example of fear causing the boys to make a bad decision for their society is when Jack decides that they need to leave part of the pig that they hunted for the beast. Golding illustrates Jack’s electrifying fear of the creature, and Jack says, “...we’ll leave part of the kill for [the beast]” (136). Jack’s decision to leave part of the kill for a creature that they haven’t seen yet is irrational, also because they have a limited supply of meat on the island. With Jack throwing away meat and taking it for granted, he is making it much harder on the boys to
As Golding mentions in his quote, “the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual”. That is why Jack’s defects of savage like immaturity are the reasons for the barbaric way of life of the boys at the end of the story (because he is the main leader at that point). For Instance when Jack is supposed to keep a signal fire going (which he did not) and a ship passed by, Ralph angrily told Jack that he “let the fire out”. However Jack is too happy about killing his first pig that he is “vaguely irritated by this irrelevance but too happy to let it worry him”. Then he goes on “proudly” saying “I cut the Pig’s throat…You should have seen it!”(73). As a result, it can be observed that one of Jack’s defects is his disregard for important matters such as creating shelters and (in this case) being rescued. Rather he is too selfish, and is more concerned with things that he finds of relevance, such as having fun by killing animals. This lust for hunting and killing later becomes a defect of society when Jack becomes the main leader. This is so because in Jack’s rule hunting and killing is something common and normal, to the extent that the boys killed a farrowing sow without any sympathetic concern for their dreadful action. Moreover this lead to the pretend killing of Robert in which even Ralph joined in because “The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering” (104), and this eventually lead to the death of Simon (the most innocent boy on the island) where they “struck, bit, [and] tore” (169) him apart. The fact that Jack’s primitive nature and lust for hunting and killing pigs, ended up killing the most innocent character, and causing his enemy leader to partly join in his savage lifestyle, shows that the defects of society really do depend on the defects of the
Jack fails to realize that the boys need security, stability, and order on the island Jack was a leader of the choir before the boys landed on the island. These boys, who were in the choir, still want to follow Jack; however, they have no discipline at all. The only thing that is on Jack’s mind is hunting. He doesn’t care about anything else, except capturing and kill the pigs for some food.
While Jack and Ralph are exploring the island, they encounter a piglet which Jack supposedly attempts to kill. After gaining the courage to kill the baby pig, Jack rectifies the situation by saying "I was just waiting for a moment to decide where to stab him (Golding 31)." This event clearly illustrates that along with inherent evil, "man is [also] capable of being good and kind, and has to choice and free will to choose which one he will become."(Ridley 97) Jack's mercy is short-lived, however, and when they encounter another pig, Jack and his hunters are relentless.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a novel that represents a microcosm of society in a tale about children stranded on an island. Of the group of young boys there are two who want to lead for the duration of their stay, Jack and Ralph. Through the opposing characters of Jack and Ralph, Golding reveals the gradual process from democracy to dictatorship from Ralph's democratic election to his lack of law enforcement to Jack's strict rule and his violent law enforcement.
The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding used a group of British boys beached on a deserted island to illustrate the malicious nature in mankind. Lord of the Flies dealt with the changes the boys underwent as they gradually adapted to the freedom from their society. William Golding's basic philosophy that man was inherently evil was expressed in such instances as the death of Simon, the beast within the boys, and the way Ralph was fervently hunted.