William Golding displays the experiences of both the children in Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin that they are products of their environments, and due to their own primitive and cruel true nature, however hidden and repressed, reveal the ills of their own being as a result. Through drastic and stressful changes in environment or social hierarchy, anything pertaining to the current environment a person is in, is able to change the human mind and cause it to degrade either itself or bring about internal destruction, whether by revealing the savage innate nature of man to a group of children in lord of the flies or bringing about the insanity of Martin, in pincher martin, the environment they live in is able to change them, in permanent ways …show more content…
because their situation paired with immovable inherent destructive traits allows for their vulnerability for those changes.. Lord of the Flies removes authority and civilization, the structure that keeps them together, and the addition of a stressful survivalist scenario is what, through the children's unstable morals, allows them to revert to a state of savagery that is present in them inherently.
In Pincher Martin, Martin is already morally corrupt and the fact that he is vulnerable to the stress of survival that brings about the two points. One is where he is unable to survive with his sanity when his greedy almighty beliefs and already corrupt mind lead him to insanity. Secondly there is an internal vulnerability when it is shown through his double death, the first in his fantasy where he is completely unable to survive even a few seconds in the ocean and the second not even being able to survive his imagined state on the island, his self-destruction brought out by his fall into insanity from the stress of attempting to …show more content…
survive. The overarching plot of Lord of the Flies is about children who have been marooned on an island, and the story follows the children's behaviors and devolution until they are finally found. When we are first introduced to the events of them crashing, Golding immediately places the children's behaviors as if they were only temporarily marooned. They still have trust in the adults that they will be saved as quickly as if when they were surrounded by them, where the adults would be willing to aid if necessary. As if they were only playing or were temporarily out of a normal place they believe they are only pretending, this attitude towards their situation and the act that happened due to this “its all an illusion attitude” is because out of those illusions they were able to form their own primitive society how their base inherent instincts commanded (Rosenfield). It is as if they were creating their own civilization in the absence of the one who has left them. This coping mechanism is one of the driving forces that are the layout and foundation for how the actions they commit throughout is performed through their own civilization. That civilization that the children make is further pushed by Golding with two opposing sides made evident, one, a more reckless follower, and the other, one of the older boys and of the first who took charge from the beginning, being a more understanding child. He adds the opposing nature, but it is not their feuds that bring about the most gruesome point in the story. They tear apart Simon, a boy who made himself present to them at the peak of their fear. “At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.” (Lord, 29) They have no shelter to the storm that is soon to overtake them and in an attempt to keep his power, the savage hunter, Jack, creates a chant and an emotion mingled with the fear of the storm that is to come, that when confronted with a physical form of the beast they fear on the island they immediately pounce. Even those who had once been even a bit sensible have finally with this act succumbed to the stresses of their environment and submit to their base instincts of the savage state they are in. That placement into the island with no leadership or any sense of how they were going to make it out alive, allowed for the children to create their own civilization, one they based on their instincts.
Not on things they had learned from the people they had left behind, but from those things they inherently had in them. They all, even though some were more mature than others, eventually commit a heinous act in the heat of the stress, as Ralph did in his role of killing Simon or in Jacks entire power trip from the beginning. This play imagination attitude, where they act as they want because they believe they will eventually saved or be told, in a more childish manner, that their play time has ended, is what gave them that liberty to be what they were and the stress only pushed them further. The only thing that kept them stable or reigned at the beginning was the remnants of the moralistic and caging civilization and life they had left behind. This is evident in how Piggy, at first, constantly mentions his aunt of the things he can and cannot do. It can also be seen in the final lines of the book when the children will finally be saved. “The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too.”
(Lord, 157) At the sudden moment they are at the peak of emotions before they are thrust back into the life and society they once had. As soon as they see the soldier, there presumably to save them, the are reminded, pulled out of the illusion play mentality they had been in to survive, of the civilization they shed as soon as there was no one to impose it upon then and realized all they had done the atrocious acts they had committed. They cry because they have lost the innocence that their old civilization has fabricated on them and for their realization of what they truly are and how much they had devolved due to their placement and reaction to their situation. Similar to Lord of the Flies, we are met with an immediate sense of immorality from Martin as we get to know how he has lived his life, a connection with people being inherently evil. Learning about his personality we soon find out through his own reflection how much of an immoral person he was. In one of his most prominent personality traits, he futilely chases a woman and when rejected threatens her with a car crash, and is also involved in an affair with the wife of one of his oldest friends. Through these experiences, we see Martin was a sexually corrupt man and thinks of women as instruments of pleasure (Singh). He goes as far as to contemplate the murder of his friend when he has married the woman he was chasing after. We see, in the actions he had performed before, some of that inherent selfish and animalistic base personality Golding used before in Lord of the flies, but because Martin is an adult his characteristics are treated and exposed in a more religious light with his ailments being lust, greed, and wrath. All said if thought of as the seven deadly sins, to be the inherent evils one must battle against or not succumb to. Golding's heavy themes into these Judeo-Christian religious themes into the sins he has committed and emulates do not end with Martins sinful personality, they also delve into one of the key aspects as to why Martin, in the situation he was in, ended up going insane. He thought too highly of himself. In his initial state of delirium, he is met with the illusion of what seems to be a godly vision and the hint of asking him to let this life go. Martin in his determination spouts “I spit upon your God!”(Pincher, 52)A notion that he is fierce and that he will not succumb to the fate that, apparently through that hallucination, God has set out for him. He believes himself powerful enough to change what has been set out by another force and by his own depiction of it, an allusion to God; he believes he is, in essence, stronger than God. That sense of him being greater, not realizing his own place, and his illusions is a basic foundation in him devolving into insanity. In that determination to survive against a greater than fate, Martin is constantly proved, by the troubles that occur on the island, that he is not capable, and he realizes his humanity, but in his stubborn mind her cannot accept it and is unable to fully accept a peaceful death. That is when he is confronted by memories, having nothing else on the island to provoke his mind. He has an identity crisis of sorts brought on by the fact he believed he could prosper and carry out, but when he finds out he can’t he has to confront his own capabilities through his identity and see what a person he was to know what he is, but is only met with the memories he made with others, all of them being those of him bringing ills to their lives through his selfish actions. Both the realization that surviving on the island is difficult, almost to the point of it being impossible, and reflecting on what he had done, Martin finally ends up going insane. Being placed in the survival situation on the island, however artificial, leads to the self-destruction of his sanity through his realization that he simply not capable of a survival that he had imagined himself. The fact that his last seconds of death and stress in the ocean water was what led to his devolution into insanity as he lived days in seconds from a self-created corrosive illusion, only enforce Goldings position of the power such stressful situations have on the minds of, humans and in Martins case leading to the destruction of his mind. From The experiences of Martin in Pincher Martin and the lost boys of Lord of the Flies with their stressful situations both are similar in the experiences the characters are put through by Golding. He sets them all up with their similarly terrible situations with their efforts are on surviving, That effect of the environment that does not fail to happen in either situation despite their backgrounds, Martin a corrupt man, and the children until recently sheltered by a civilization in the midst of war. They are slaves to their situation physical and emotional situations, from such a change in what they are both use to, a place where their environment is of no threat, a least compared to what they are in now. Those changes from playful children to downright savages, and a conniving revengeful man into a insane one are all from their environment and are able to come through with them because of their own true nature, an evil one, a savage one, by societies current standards. That prefacing and inherent personality within everyone by Goldings standards are what allow for such stressful situations to lead a diversion back to what they really are, to what they have always been. It is what allows for their own self-destruction and devolution to come from their own hands or minds.
Every chapter, these three boys, have demonstrated they have great behaviour on the island in comparison to the rest of the group. But it was tiring to constantly have an acceptable attitude because the other boys would not be so pleasant towards them. First, Ralph represented democracy, from the time he crash landed upon the sand, strategies on how to be rescued flowed in his head. He was introduced to the conch and from that point he assigned daily tasks and rules that would be completed so the island would not go insane such as creating shelter, where to dispose waste and if the conch was in your hands, you were able to speak. Next, Piggy represented scientific facts.
William Golding communicates the idea through Ralph that all the order and goodness of the island is gone when the Conch breaks and how the rest of the boys turned into savages. Golding shows in the novel that, “Samneric were savages like the rest; Piggy was dead, and the conch smashed to powder.” This quote it demonstrates how the other boys took everything from Ralph who was the only person still somewhat civilized. The rest of the boys just follow and let the evil inside consume them. The other boys broke the conch to show how they turned on the only person not evil. The conch broke because they forgot how authority works and the do not listen to anybody and more. Samneric turned to evil also and the only person that wasn’t changed was
For instance, the denial from Ralph and Jack leads the boys to make decisions that caused havoc to their society on this island. As they; Ralph, Jack and the boys engrossed the island, they simultaneously lost hope. Such as, Simon says to Ralph, “You’ll get back to where you came from” (111). Ralph tries telling the boys they are going to get rescued. But as days pass and how long they have been on the island, he is undetermined. Jack, on the other hand, does not believe that being rescued will ever occur. He tells the boys it is hopeless of them to think they can get out of the island. Furthermore, not only did they deny being rescued, but Ralph and Jack do not acknowledge the deaths of Simon and Piggy. For example, as stated in the book. “The breaking of the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapor” (184). However, Ralph does acknowledge a bit of Simon’s and Piggy’s death, but afterwards he forgot due to Jack and his tribe willing to go after him. As to Jack, he was neglectful about th...
William Golding, the author of the novel The Lord of the Flies, lived through the global conflicts of both world wars. World War II shifted his point of view on humanity, making him realize its inclination toward evilness. His response to the ongoing struggle between faith and denial became Lord of the Flies, in which English schoolboys are left to survive on their own on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. Just like Golding, these boys underwent the trauma of war on a psychological level. Ralph, one of the older boys, stands out as the “chief,” leading the other victims of war in a new world. Without the constraints of government and society, the boys created a culture of their own influenced by their previous background of England.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies portrays the lives of young British boys whose plane crashed on a deserted island and their struggle for survival. The task of survival was challenging for such young boys, while maintaining the civilized orders and humanity they were so accustomed too. These extremely difficult circumstances and the need for survival turned these innocent boys into the most primitive and savaged mankind could imagine. William Golding illustrates man’s capacity for evil, which is revealed in man’s inherent nature. Golding uses characterization, symbolism and style of writing to show man’s inhumanity and evil towards one another.
People can do anything that involves fear including turning on someone and attempting to kill them. William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1952 during the cold war. This affects the novel because children were often killed during war.This novel is important because the novel shows how the boys communicate and survive on the island. Lord of the Flies is about a group of boys on an island without any adults. In order to survive, they will have to work as a team. In the essay, I will talk about how Jack and Ralph comparison, how they have changed, and there purpose in the novel.
Piggy is known for being the most intellectual and reasonable out of the boys. While the other boys are off fooling around and dreaming about their next adventure, Piggy is using reason to plan an organized method of survival on the island where everyone is satisfied. For example, while the other boys were exploring the island, Simon came up with an idea and said, “‘I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about a clock. We could make a sundial. We could put a stick in the sand, and then—’” (Golding 90). Although the boys can rule using any form of government on the island, Piggy attempts to create a civilized and orderly environment by advising Ralph to implement a democratic state. Despite his weak appearance, Piggy has a very strong moral compass and sense of self assurance, meaning, he’s very confident in the moral choices he makes. Since he bases his actions and way of thinking on reason and justice, he has a tendency to believe everyone should follow and share his methods because “rules are rules.” As seen when electing a leader, Piggy believed that because the conch and name system were his ideas, he should have been voted as leader, resulting in “Every hand outside the choir except Piggy’s was raised immediately. Then Piggy, too, raised his hand grudgingly into the air.” (Golding 29). Due to his strong confidence, Piggy is not afraid to act upon his beliefs and what is right, even if it may not be a popular
( Golding, 87) When everyone else was afraid, he just thought that " if there's something wrong, there's someone to put it right". ( Golding 87) This shows that Piggy was levelheaded and he knew that the only thing to fear on the island were themselves. This is like he knew that the cause of breakdown in the society would be from themselves. While piggy and Ralph were able to keep order almost successfully, others would leave because they were in to not having rules and just having fun without actual work and effort being put in to help them along. Ralph says, "Piggy, are you the only one left? No there's Samn'Eric." This is later in the book and it shows how people are able to ignore the rules. Only the moral and honest people stayed with Ralph and Piggy To try and be saved. The rest were bloodthirsty savages and left with Jack to hunt and Kill. Piggy also really respected Ralph. When Ralph was upset with the "accident" that happened with Simon, Piggy knew that even though Ralph was doing wrong things, he would work things out. Piggy helps to show how unnecessary it is to dwell on these matters saying "What good're you doing talking like that". (Golding, 156) Piggy knew no one would listen to himself, so he
William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of The Flies’ tells the story of a group of English boys isolated on a desert island, left to attempt to retain civilisation. In the novel, Golding shows one of the boys, Jack, to change significantly. At the beginning of the book, Jack’s character desires power and although he does not immediately get it, he retains the values of civilized behaviour. However, as the story proceeds, his character becomes more savage, leaving behind the values of society. Jack uses fear of the beast to control the other boys and he changes to become the book’s representation of savagery, violence and domination. He is first taken over with an obsession to hunt, which leads to a change in his physical appearance This change of character is significant as he leads the other boys into savagery, representing Golding’s views of there being a bad and unforgiving nature to every human.
Golding has a rather pessimistic view of humanity having selfishness, impulsiveness and violence within, shown in his dark yet allegorical novel Lord of the Flies. Throughout the novel, the boys show great self-concern, act rashly, and pummel beasts, boys and bacon. The delicate facade of society is easily toppled by man's true beastly nature.
In both novels, the main characters are isolated from any form of true civilisation. In Lord of the Flies, the boys find themselves on a desolate island which is devoid of any human life due to a plane crash, whereas in The Road the Man and Boy live in a bleak, destroyed America in which almost the entire population has been wiped out due to an unnamed natural disaster. Because of the lack of resources and essentials, it is inevitable that the main characters have to find means of surviving – in Lord of the Flies; this is mainly through hunting and building shelter and in The Road, the Man and the Boy trek along the barren landscape in search for any remaining food they can find.
In Lord of the Flies, William Golding expresses the idea that humans are naturally immoral, and that people are moral only because of the pressures of civilization. He does this by writing about a group of boys, and their story of survival on an island. The civilized society they form quickly deteriorates into a savage tribe, showing that away from civilization and adults, the boys quickly deteriorate into the state man was millions of years ago. This tendency is shown most in Jack, who has an animalistic love of power, and Roger, who loves to kill for pleasure. Even the most civilized boys, Ralph and Piggy, show that they have a savage side too as they watch Simon get murdered without trying to save him. Simon, the only one who seems to have a truly good spirit, is killed, symbolizing how rare truly good people are, and how quickly those personalities become corrupted.
In the end, they are being rescued, but too much is lost. Their innocence is forever lost along with the lives of Simon, a peaceful boy, and an intelligent boy, Piggy. Throughout the novel, Golding uses symbolism and characterization to show that savagery and evil are a direct effect of fear. Initially, the boys carried on about in a civilized, systematic and fearless manner when first landing on the island. Ralph has just blown the conch and some small children responded to the sound by gathering at the source of the sound.
The first two kids are considered leaders but only to the littluns who really do not matter in the big picture. To the bigguns, Simon is just a silent and, 'batty'; kid who is called odd the entire story. Until he thinks he sees the beast everyone ignored him and when this happens he's running to tell all the boys that he had seen the beast and when they see him coming they mistake him for the beast and stab him repeatedly until he is dead. Simon is really just misunderstood because Ralph thinks he is a big help. As he says in the story, 'Simon, he helps.'; Ralph is referring in this quote to the building of the shelters. The only people who work to get shelters from the rain are Ralph, Piggy, and Simon. Now Piggy did not stand a chance from the beginning. When they first get on the island all everyone does is make fun of him and that does not stop until his death in the end of the story. The thing that the others do not notice is that Piggy is a smart kid who knows what he is doing.
In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the representation of childhood as times of tribulation and terror along with the community accepted portrayal of innocence shapes the theme of civilization vs savagery.