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Back to Subjects - Book Reports

lord of the flies2

lord of the flies2 I chose to do one of my book reports on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The reason I chose this book is because it deals with many issues that are important to leading a solid Christian based life. It also deals with some issues that were talked about in class, for example discrimination, prayer and civilized behavior. The book starts out with Ralph and Piggy walking through the woods on what appears to be a deserted island. We are told that a plane transporting many young boys between the ages of 5 and 12 crashed on this island and these are the first two characters that we meet. Ralph and Piggy find their way out of the woods and onto a beach where they discover a conch shell that can be played as a horn. Ralph sounds this horn and shortly after a number of young boys emerged from the woods. It is now revealed that no adults are on the island and it is just the boys. They then decide to form a make shift government and piggy appoints Ralph to be the leader since he initiated the meeting. One boy named Jack, a member of a boy’s choir, protests the fact that Ralph was named the leader. So to please Jack, Ralph tells him that he will be in charge of hunting and gathering food, this along with teasing Piggy about his weight pleases Jack. The boys them split up and start to scope out the island and Jack organizes the first hunt, which is unsuccessful. As time goes on Ralph notices that many of the boys aren’t really doing any work and would rather be playing or sleeping instead, this worries him a little. He then goes out to explore the island with a choirboy named Simon, when they came back they called a meeting by signaling the conch. At this meeting Ralph sets up some basic rules. The main ones being that you can only talk at a meeting if you are holding the conch and that a fire must be keep going all the time on top of the mountain in case a ship passed by so that they could be rescued. The other boys like the ideas and rush up the mountain to start a fire. After they gather a bunch of firewood they realize that nobody can start a fire without matches. Piggy then suggests that they use the lenses of his glasses to spark a flame. The fire starts and gets a bit out of hand and Piggy thinks that one of the younger boys has been burned to death. All of the other boys laugh at Piggy and deny the incident. This is the first real sign of chaos on the island. The boys soon become accustomed to the daily rhythm on their tropical island, they sleep a lot and the little ones often eat unripe fruit that causes them to get sick. Jack begins to paint his face with colored clay and charcoal before he and the others go out hunting. One day Ralph and Piggy notice a ship on the horizon and to their horror they discover that the signal fire as gone out. The two boys rush up the mountain and find that Jack had left the fire unattended to go out hunting. When Ralph confronts Jack about the fire he is ignored because Jack is too caught up with his capture of a pig. Piggy then tries to lecture Jack about leaving the fire and Jack responded by slapping Piggy in the face and breaking a lens on his glasses. This causes tension between Jack and Ralph. Later the pig was roasted and Jack wouldn’t let Piggy have any. Ralph calls a meeting to discuss the immaturity in the group but Jack doesn’t listen and runs off with some other boys. That night an air battle takes place while the boys were sleeping. During this time the body of a pilot parachuted down to the island. When the firewatchers Sam and Eric wake up they hear the sound of the parachute and are very frightened. They run down the mountain and tell the others, even Ralph is scared. This causes the boys to go on an expedition of the island to find these “beasts” as Sam and Eric described them. On the expedition the boys find an unknown part of the island and decide to build a hut there. Jack then decides to go on another hunt and Ralph joins them. He is excited by the thrill of the hunt and begins to see why the others get so pumped when they kill a pig. The next morning Jack grabs the conch and signals a meeting. At the meeting he announces that Ralph should be voted out of power and none of the younger boys support him so he leaves the group with some other boys and starts his own tribe. Jack appointed Roger as his right hand man and their group went out hunting. They kill a pig and mount the head on a stick and leave it for the beast. Then they attack Ralph’s group and steal some burning sticks so that they can start a fire at their camp. Jack then announces that he will be having a feast and everyone was invited. This whole time Simon had been sitting in the woods staring at the Pigs head or Lord of the Flies, and imagines that it was speaking to him. It warns him that he cannot escape and the beast is a part of everyone and he is responsible for all of their difficulties, this make Simon faint. Later on that night Piggy and Jack decide to join Jack’s feast because they are starving. Jack invites them to eat and Ralph tries to assert some authority but fails. Jack gets the rest of the boys to join his tribe and Piggy fears that a fight will occur. As darkness falls the boys start to dance around the fire waiving their weapons, even Ralph and Piggy join in. Then the boys notice a figure come from the woods and they attack it, they beat the figure to death. It turns out that it was Simon coming to tell them about what the pig’s head told him. They never realized that it was Simon and his body is washed out to sea. The next day Ralph and Piggy are ashamed and scared. Jack organizes another attack on Ralph and they stole Piggy’s glasses. The next day they go to talk to Jack, when they found Jack they argue and Roger pushes a boulder down the hill, which crushes Piggy to death because he couldn’t see where it was coming from. The Jack throws a sphere at Ralph, it cuts him but he escapes. Jack then tries to smoke Ralph out of the woods by setting them on fire. Again Ralph escapes and runs to the beach where he falls at the feet of a British Naval officer who saw the flames from his ship. That is how the story ends. This book dealt with many issues and they can be related to the issued talked about in our class. The first issue that can be addressed is discrimination. This is seen by the way Jack treats Piggy throughout the book. Piggy is an overweight kid and he also wears glasses. I know as well as others, that children are mean and a person who looks the way Piggy does will get mad fun of and teased. It is in no way right or justified by the fact that they are children but it does happen. Some issues that we talked about dealing with discrimination are the holocaust and different religious beliefs. Prayer is also indirectly addressed in the book when Simon sits and stares at the Pigs head. This could be related to prayer because normally when people pray they sit in silence and sometimes stare at a statue just as Simon did. The most abstract and symbolic incident in the book occurs when Simon sees this sacrifice. The symbol of Christianity, and what is good, meets the symbol of the Devil, and all that is evil. We know that Simon is only hallucinating because of his epilepsy, but a lot of what he sees make sense. The pig’s bloody head convinces him that “everything is bad business’… The half shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life.” The Lord of the Flies says, “Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill… I’m part of you… I’m the reason why it’s no go… Why things are what they are.” What Golding is saying is that the Devil is hidden somewhere deep inside of all people. Without morals, law and order it will eventually surface and come out. Just like Jesus Christ Simon cared about the small and vulnerable, he loved nature and all living. Simon is also a prophet. He knows that Ralph will come back to civilization alive. He does not say anything about himself or Piggy. Neither Simon nor Jesus was ever scared, because they are certain that what is meant to happen will prevail. They were both able to challenge the unknown and conquer it. Jesus won over death; Simon faced the Beast and came back alive. Jesus did it for all the people living on Earth, Simon for the other boys. What is so puzzling and sad is that they were both killed when they tried to share what they had found out. They were both killed in anger and in the belief that they were evil. The major example found in the book that can be related to our class is the one of leading a civilized moral life. The boys on the island first start out by trying to make some sort of government and civilization but these efforts fail. As time past on the island the boys lost all control and became more and more unruly. They had no respect for the other people they were around and no respect for human life. When the first little one died in the fire none of them seemed to care except for Ralph and Piggy. This is very scary to think of. To live a healthy moral life we must learn to live with each other no matter what our differences may be. We have to be able to cooperate and get along with each other. The boys on the island were more worried about themselves instead of getting rescued. They couldn’t organize themselves and they made no efforts to get along a group. Jack was one of the main problems on the island because he didn’t want to listen to a word Ralph had to say. He was more worried with hunting and killing then anything else and many boys followed his lead. This book also shows us how important the role of adults in a child’s life can be. Granted a situation like this doesn’t take place everyday if ever, but you can see that without an adult present the boys run wild and almost in a way loose sanity. When Simon and Piggy were killed no one thought twice about it. They figured that since no adults were around to scold them then it was all right. So we see how important parents are and how much they can influence their children. These boys were too young to be stranded alone and they couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong. I’m sure that as adults they would look back and see how hostile and evil they had become. Someone who has a similar view of this book is Kristian Moe who is a teacher in New York. I found this statement at www.malvik.no/engelsk/lordoftheflies.htm, he writes, “I feel that the book is very sad. In some ways it is even a little grotesque. It portrays human nature in its worst and darkest. It is very scary, and it makes me think about the world wars, and about Hitler’s racism and hatred. I can not believe that we have so many dark sides within us, but maybe we do.” In conclusion, I have to say that I enjoy this book because it is exciting and scary at the same time. I’m sure that everyone at one point in their life has dreamed of being on a deserted island, but I’m also sure that nobody would want their experience to be like the one we see in this book. Unless of course that have no sense of Christian values and are willing to subject themselves to that type of devilish behaviour. Bibliography:

Word Count: 2117