Translate

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Lord of the Flies



            In Lord of the Flies for a large section of the book, it is unclear who the protagonist of the book is. When the book begins it has two main characters that emerge from the jungle first. “The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost visible, was the heat.” It seems that these two boys would naturally become the protagonists, but later Simon and Jack also seem fit for the role of protagonist. Later in the book when Simon and Piggy die, it seems like Ralph is the protagonist and Jack is the antagonist, but I do not entirely agree with that. I think the book was not a story about good guys and bad guys, I think it was more about human morality and how we act without authority or threat of punishment. The protagonist was the entire group and the antagonist was the group’s slow decay.
            One thing in this book that is different from most other survival books about this book is that there are never any threats to the groups lives except for themselves. Most of the time in books like this there is a famine or a hurricane, something that threatens the wellbeing of the characters in the book but in Lord of the Flies there is never anything like that. They even make up their own threat in their imaginations in the book. “He still says he saw the beastie. It came and went away again an’ came back and wanted to eat him” I believe the reason William Golding did not add something like that, is so the book would show how a group would decay on its own without authority. I think that the group probably would have remained more united if there had been a threat. They would have had a common enemy so they would not have become enemies of each other.
            I think that the overall theme of this book is the importance of authority and rules. When people learn that there is nothing stopping them from doing whatever they want, the entire idea of remaining civilized is ignored and replaced with greed and a grab for power. On the island when they attempt to make rules, it fails because they have no way to enforce the rules. Everyone on the island has an even amount of power, so no one is in a position to enforce rules.

1 comment:

  1. You do a good job of focusing on the ambiguity of this novel and what sets it apart from a traditional "Stranded on an island" story. You do a great job of looking past the plot and seeing the role of authority in the novel. That is tough to do, but you do it well. You use great examples as evidence in this examination, as well.

    ReplyDelete