A Report On: Lord Of The Flies The following report is on William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies. The book itself is 208 pages. The topics that will be covered are a brief summary, type of chronology used, evaluation of character development, type of conflicts, themes, writers styles, and personal opinions. This novel takes place on a boat like shaped island. There is a jungle, beach, and a lagoon. There are pigs and fish that they can eat, and different fruits.
This novel is about several young boys trying to survive on this island after their plane crashed. They have to work together in order to survive. There aren’t any grown ups around. Ralph and Piggy are the first to appear after the crash.
Ralph finds a conch shell and blows into it hoping to get the attention of the other survivors. When they get around in a circle, they elect Ralph as the chief. Jack gets upset and this begins the conflict between Jack and Ralph. Jack decides that he and his choir, now called “hunters” want to go out and hunt for food.
On his first attempt, he fails. One of the boys mentions that there is a beast on the island. Nobody paid too much attention to him, but in the back of their minds they knew there had to be something out there. Ralph decides that they need a fire so that ships can rescue them. They use to start the fire. Each of the boys were told to watch out for ships but they decided to play instead so they missed their opportunity to be rescued earlier.
Jack and his “hungers” have become obsessed with hunting and killing. They painted their faces and finally killed a pig. Finally Jack breaks away from Ralph’s leadership and he tells the others to follow him. He killed another pig and put the head of the pig on a stake, which symbolized The Lord Of The Flies.
While Jack and the “hunters” were roasting the pig, Simon finds a dead man hanging from the rocks wearing a parachute. When he ran to tell the boys they mistaken him for the beast and kill him. Now only Ralph, Piggy and the twins remain together. The fight for leadership reaches a climax when Jack turns violent. The hunters stole Piggy’s glasses, broke the conch, stole the twins and Roger ends up killing Piggy by throwing a boulder at him over the edge. Jack wanted to kill Ralph then, but Ralph ran into the woods to hide.
Jack set the island on fire to try to smoke Ralph out. When Ralph was running away from the smoke, he ran into a naval officer who had seen the smoke and came to rescue them. He thought that the boys were just playing games, but he really didn’t know how much the boys had gone through while they were on that island. The type of chronology used is progressive. Each chapter leads into the other chapter and you learn more about each character, as you get further into the book. If you took out any of the chapters the book wouldn’t make sense.
The characters that were explained the most were Ralph, Piggy, Jack and the twins. Ralph is about 12 years old and he is fair headed. He is described as being built and is chosen as the leader due to his positive qualities. Jack is about 12 also.
He has red hair and he has a skinnier build than Ralph. At first he was the leader of his choir group, in which they were given the name “hunters.” Jack turned into a horrible child that liked to hunt and kill. Piggy is short, overweight, has asthma, and wears glasses. He tries his best to keep peace. His glasses are very important because they are used over and over again to start fires. Sam and Eric are two young twins who always travel and do everything together.
Without each other they are incapable of almost everything. There are many different conflicts in this novel. They include Person Vs Person, Person Vs nature, Person Vs Society, Person Vs Self and Person Vs unknown. Ralph and Jack is one. Ralph represents order and composure in society. Jack grew tired of Ralph being in charge.
He went into a rampage, destroying everything the boys worked so hard for to create. Another conflict was the Boys Vs. The Beast. The beast symbolizes the devil and is made up of all the evil that is inside each of the boys. As the boys grew farther away from any civilization their desire to kill the beast grew.
They went from being scared at first to wanting to kill it. Another conflict is Boys Vs. Nature. The boys went hunting many times to keep themselves alive. At first they were scared to kill, by the end of the book, they weren’t afraid to kill but wanted to kill. Boys Vs.
Piggy was another one. Piggy represented the kind of people that get picked on a lot. The boys were horrible to him because of his big glasses and of his weight. The boys didn’t really understand either because they didn’t know anyone like Piggy. For an example they didn’t know what asthma was. Jack Vs.
Society is another one. Jack couldn’t stand taking orders from Ralph anymore. It made him even more angry. He didn’t like participating in the rules that they had either. He must have felt like this before he even came to the island.
He didn’t want to listen to anyone but himself and felt his ideas were the best. There are actually many different themes in this book. William Golding says that “the theme (of the book) is an attempt to trace back the defects of society to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.” One of the most basic and obvious themes is that society holds everyone together, and with out these conditions, our ideals, values, and the basics of right and wrong are lost. Another theme is that people often single out others to give themselves security. This happened a lot with Piggy, which wasn’t fair.
The boys definitely singled him out and Piggy knew what was happening. I liked Golding’s style. It was fast moving, smooth, and I was able to understand what he was writing for the most part. He used good word choices when talking about a scene. In the first scene, when the boys were talking about how wonderful the island was, Golding used words like “thorns” and “Creeper” to tell us that the island wasn’t very friendly at all. He also uses good imagery.
The point of view was usually objective, but was sometimes omniscient, showing the thought of only one character at a time in the scene. Most of the story is told through the eyes of the boys, but sometimes it changed to the viewpoint to that of the author. The age level that this book would be best suited is 12 and older. I think that boys would enjoy it more just for the fact that it is a book based on all boys.
The only thing in the story that bothered me was the killings of the two young boys.