Task -
“Golding is more concerned to show what happens to people who have nothing, rather than make a point about good and evil” Discuss this comment focusing particularly on the characters Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon.
In the Lord of the Flies, Golding is more concerned to show what happens to people who have nothing, rather than make a point about good and evil. To do this, he develops a society where survival is a key factor and how the characters develop to have no knowledge and nothing from the past world.
The main characters Jack, Ralph, Piggy and Simon each express their own contrasting views towards many dominant themes. The two themes displayed throughout the movie are good and evil in a society. But one of the most basic and obvious themes is that society holds everyone together, and without structure, our ideals, values, and the basics of right and wrong are lost.
Golding has contrasted the characters to show the morals they hold on the island, and each individual’s perception of this. A good example is when Jack and Ralph are bonded as close allies in the beginning, and then throughout the movie, Jack becomes an antagonist, while Ralph is protagonist. Both characters have extremely contrasting point of views on the island as to how they should organize their followers.
Ralph, one of the main characters in the beginning had been elected as a leader due to his many positive qualities. The election gave him an advantage with priority, as how to organize the rules and to establish law and order. He is very motive and represents susceptibility throughout the movie. Ralph shows morality and mainly appeals to an adult survival. When Ralph loses Piggy and Simon he is left with nothing. His old members had already betrayed him, since they left to join Jack’s group of savages to hunt for meat. Then Ralph has no food, no shelter, and no friends to support with him with the harsh conditions on the island. He is basically left with nothing. He goes to the other group and meets the twins, and scavenges for food. At the end when he is running for his life away from the savages, he lands on his knees begging for mercy and cries with tears at the rescue team, since he is tired, cannot cope with the conditions and left with nothing. This was a very emotional scene at the end.
Two of his ‘true’ friends, Piggy and Simon are bonded in a close relationship throughout the movie.
Piggy represents intelligence and is positive about being rescued throughout the movie. Piggy lacks social skills and has trouble communicating or fitting with others. He is short and an overweight boy who wears glasses and represents order and democracy, as displayed when he speaks into the conch. Towards the end of the movie, he is the only person that is wearing his clothing which symbolizes civilization and normality. Piggy is also seemed to be very impractical and vulnerable because he’s blinded when having no glasses and has asthma. Jack was a major enemy of Piggy and Jack never seemed to like him in the movie. The overwhelming emotion Jack and his hunters have to "kill the pig" is an indirect and clever metaphor to suggest the boys are also killing a part of Piggy. When Jack and his gang continue to kill more pigs, the logic and reason which Piggy symbolizes progressively diminishes with the pigs. In the end, Piggy dies from a rock boulder from the enemy savages which the rock boulder is symbolized as ‘brute force’. Another character named Simon also dies from the savages, though he dies in an accidental death.
Simon was also closely bonded with Ralph and Piggy throughout the movie. He is very good and pure, and has the most positive outlook. He insists multiple times that they will get rescued, even when Ralph strongly doubts the possibility of not being rescued. He recognizes what needs to be done to survive. Simon is killed afterwards by all of the other boys in Jack’s group, who were caught up in a savage dance. He was seen as a Christ figure by giving up his own life in an attempt to tell the rest of the boys about the beast. Yet when he crawls out of the forest, Jack and his hunters see him as the beast, and murder his body which floats out to sea.
Jack is the leading advocate of anarchy on the island and the leader of the savage tribe which hunts the pigs. Opposed to Ralph and Piggy on almost all matters, Jack supports the notion that one’s desires are most important and should be followed, regardless of reason or morals.
Jack is the kind of person which Golding believed everyone would eventually become if left alone to set one’s own standards and live the way one naturally wanted. Golding believed that the natural state of humans is chaos and that man is inherently evil; when reason is abandoned, only the strong survive. Jack personifies this idea perfectly. His group kills both Simon and Piggy, while Ralph was the only survivor of his own group.
Golding places critical morals and values that affect not only modern society but also the greater humanity. The movie is not only just a recount of the fictional lives but a guide to kindness and passion, and not to oppression and violence. Golding places this in effect through the boys’ praise worthy actions via their constant attempts to be civilized human beings. But this was only appropriate in the previous world and it doesn’t really suit the new island world as they have been stripped of their past life, structure and it is the disintegration into nothing that catapults them into conflict. This was the ‘darkness of humanity’ that is created on the island, and anarchy wins over law and order on the island.
In conclusion, the movie describes in detail the horrific exploits of a band of young children who make a striking transition from civilized to barbaric. On an island, they have continued to develop to have nothing from the past world, as piggy loses his glasses and their clothing continues to come off. Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon had established their own rules but society continued to be corrupted. Piggy and Simon become casualties of death in the movie. Jack causes conflict throughout the movie and Ralph is luckily enough to survive. Therefore, having nothing leads to a more corrupted society as the disintegration into nothing catapults them into conflict. Therefore, Golding is more concerned to show what happens to people who have nothing, rather than make a point about good and evil.
. For English Year 10, we are currently studying The Lord of the Flies and comparing both movies, the American version with the English/British version. We have seen both movies and the teacher is making us watch the American version again to write notes on about each character. The reason why we are writing notes on each character and watching the movie again is for this English Task shown below: