The Lord Of The Flies: A Literary Analysis

It could be said that tragedies serve as Humanity’s catalysts of thought. When we line up literary eras with wars, the shifts in eras are always marked by some war- especially in America. The Romantic period was broken by the dawn of the civil war, and took a little magic from the world of writing. Writing shifted to realism, which was the polar opposite of romantic thought. When the First World War broke out, the modernist movement overshadowed realism. Similarly, the Second World War produced postmodernism. Should there be another horrible tragedy, the view will shift similarly. Whatever the implications may be, tragedies seem to change how us humans think and act. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, he tells the story of a group of schoolboys

Jack had a bit of a war-mongering stripe in him. His need for conflict and competition is evident throughout the book, such as butting heads with Ralph and bullying Piggy. Even worse, he was the “Leader of the choir boys…who followed him everywhere.” (Golding 16). He had a following before he reached the island, whereas Ralph had to build his own faction. As a final advantage, Jack was also one of the older boys on the island, so anyone younger would automatically look to him for advice and help, along with Ralph. However, being that many of the other boys owed their loyalties to Jack due to their collective participation in choir, some of the stragglers might seek to go to the larger “side” that developed in the latter half of the book. Solomon Asch’s explained this in his work on conformity, which states that if a large number of individuals are moving in a direction, more should follow. Luckily for Ralph and Piggy, it was not unanimous, or the likelihood of them gaining followers would be almost nil. Piggy had predispositions that were better earlier on in the story, but soon faded into obscurity. Piggy was representative of the educated man of society; the one society produces so that the individual can be successfully adapted to society. While his keen ideas were useful at the beginning of their endeavors, his physical shortcomings ultimately doomed him.