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Innocence in american literature
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“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” ― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect. In the book, The Lord of the Flies, a group of kids crash on an island and have to fend for themselves. Innocence is in the crashing of the plane because it is when the boys realize that they have to do things alone now. They had to work together to set up a nice society and to keep everything running good. However they lost their innocence with their actions. First it was killing the mama pig and hunting for her. Then moved on to the death of simon and that they killed him. Also chasing Ralph and going savage and then killing Piggy. The book, The Lord of the Flies, is about a group of boys that have to survive alone. They progressively lose their sense of innocence. It starts off with the rules and to keep them all sane and not savage. Which the boys are good at for the first few months of civilization. Until the day came where they first killed the mama pig. "We spread round. I crept, on hands and knees. The spears fell out because they hadn't barbs on. The pig ran …show more content…
He wanted a sane, organized civilization and wanted rules for everything. He was the one in the beginning who wanted fire to signal, but they were against it and didn’t listen. Although he was apart of the killing of Simon he was the most stable of the boys. They all argued about the signal fire and using Piggy’s glasses and Jack was fighting them for it.“Just an ordinary fire. You’d think we could do that, wouldn’t you? Just a smoke signal so we can be rescued. Are we savages or what? (Golding 244) Jack and Roger were hunting down Ralph and had the big fire going across the beach. Which meant that Ralph had to run from the savages and the fire. But ends up at the feet of a naval officer who gives them help. In the end Ralph was the smartest one because the idea of the signal fire was what got them
A group of kids got stuck on an island after their plane got shot down and they all have many different personalities. Being stuck on an island usually brings out the worst of people.But, there were two characters in novel, “The Lord of The Flies” that had good morals. These two characters were Ralph and Simon. Ralph and Simon weren’t intimidated by not having any adults around, instead, they tried to bring out the best of themselves and not take part in any horseplay the rest of the boys did.
“The duty of the youth is to challenge corruption,” Kurt Cobain once said. The Lord of the Flies tells a fictional story of a group of kids whose plane crashes on an island. Among these boys is Jack, a choirboy who is eager to hunt and create laws. However, in Lord of the Flies, the character Jack shows himself to be an arrogant tyrant because throughout the novel he acts in a way that is cruel, evil, and violent.
Ralph is one of the few boys who realize that the only way to survive is through peace and order. Because he summons the boys at the beginning of the novel with the conch he and Piggy find, they look upon him as the most responsible of the boys and elect him as a chief over the humiliated Jack. Ralph creates a stable and peaceful society for the children to live; this significantly bothers Jack because he wants to have fun and do things that he never did back in the civilized society. Jack is eventually successful of pulling nearly all of the children out of Ralph’s control to form savages. Ralph represents the civilization, and Jack represents the primitive society.
Golding teaches the reader that when dictatorial authority is created, the fear of going against it is much stronger than the need to speak one’s mind. The children, being starving, begin to kill pigs as a group; the hunting scenes in the novel are quite brutal and create fear for the reader and hunters alike. During a moment where a group of children are searching for a wild pig in the forest, the hunters begin gathering around character Roger. A few begin to poke fun at him, and the rest follow their lead; they drive their spears at his direction and chant “Kill the pig! Cut his throat!” (Golding 114), which of course scares many of the hunters and Roger. They are no longer consciously making decisions; their personalities have been altered by their fear and impulse to follow the leader. What must be months into their life on the island, they have learned to make fires and where to camp; tensions have risen between two sides of the surviving boys, and their fears of dying become all too intense. When a storm is upon the group and they are all uneasy, Jack instructs the boys to “Do our dance! Come on! Dance!” (Golding 151), and because they fear the consequences, they did as he commanded. In simple words, The Lord of the Flies is teaching us that when there is a leader and a mob to follow,
He blows the conch and summons the deserted children together” (Li & Wu 1). While all the boys are interested mainly in playing and setting out to satisfy their own needs, Ralph is focused on building shelter and keeping a fire going to facilitate their rescue. As one can see, Ralph is “the representative of civilization and democracy, lives by rules, acts peacefully, and follows moral commands and values the good of the group, who dramatically reveals the condition of civilization and democracy in Golding’s time” (Li & Wu
Ralph shows that he has a better understanding of the boys than Jack. He knows that the boys need some sort of order on the island in order for them to survive. He starts a simple form of government and sets a few rules for them. Even though they don’t last very long, the fact that he tried to help the group is what makes him a better leader. Ralph’s wisdom and ability to look toward the future also has an advantage over Jack. He has a sense to keep his focus on getting off the island. When the fire goes out, Ralph gets upset because the chance to be rescued was gone as well. Ralph enforces his role of leadership as he gives the boys a sense of stability of an authority figure. He keeps the boys in pretty good order at the meeting by making a rule that they can only speak if they have the conch. Ralph knows that the littleuns are afraid and they need shelter to feel more secure. They work together for a while, but as the time goes on the smaller boys want to go play. They slowly lose all their help until Simon and Ralph are the only ones left to work on them. Ralph knows that this is a necessity and keeps bringing it up at the meetings. Jack, on the other hand, is doing nothing but causing chaos.
Ralph was introduced as a fair and likeable boy. His interaction with Piggy demonstrated his kind nature as he did not call him names with hateful intentions as Jack had. His good looks allowed him to be well accepted among his peers, and this gave him enough confidence. His handsome features and the conch as a symbol of power and order made him stand out from the crowd of boys and led to his being proclaimed Chief: "There was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerful, there was the conch" (p. 24). From the quick decisions he made as Chief near the beginning of the novel, it could be seen that Ralph was well-organized. Gradually, Ralph became confused and began to lose realness in his thoughts and speeches: "Ralph was puzzled by the shutter that flickered in his brain. There was something he wanted to say; then the shutter had come down." (p. 156) He started to feel lost as the boys, with the exception of Piggy, began to change and adapt to their freedom.. He was more influenced by Piggy than by Jack.
Have you ever thought about six to thirteen year olds ever acting like savages and turning into a serial killer? After reading Lord of the Flies, this is exactly what happened. Ralph, Piggy, Jack and other kids cash land on a gorgeous island with leaving no trace for the world to find them. Ralph tries to be organized and logical, but in the other hand, Jack is only interested in satisfying his pleasures. Just like in the short story, The Tortoise And The Hare, Lord of the Flies, stands for something. This novel is a psychological allegory, the island, as the mind, Ralph, the leader, as the ego, Jack, the hunter, as the id, and Piggy, an annoying little boy, as the super ego. As we read Lord Of
He is trying to be a teamplayer not like Jack who want’s to go adventure and kill things Ralph is protective and really smart. So If I was in Ralph situation then I would have not been able to prevent the deaths because Jack was way out of control. Even though there has been times where Ralph did not do what a leader should of done. There was times he was picking on piggy and time he was acting like himself. Although the difference between Jack and Ralph is that Ralph is not evil, cynical, or selfish he knows the difference between right and what’s wrong.
The basic premise of Lord of the Flies is that humans naturally live in savagery and ignorance, without any idea of how to live together. It is the story of boys stranded on an island who must develop a government to survive. Every detail of the story holds symbolism. For example, each character represents an aspect of society : those who represent human nature survive, and those who are self-actualized--the scientists, the religious, the leaders--all die. The most terrifying death is that of Simon, who symbolizes the eyes of a blindfolded and stumbling people. He alone saw that the jungle, which represented freedom and the lack of civilization, was not to be feared but to be understood; he alone knew that the mythical Beast of the island, feared by all the boys, was in fact their own inherent savagery. (The title, Lord of the Flies, is in fact a translation of "Beelzebub," a name of the devil in the Judeo-Christian tradition).
However, at the end of the book, he simply stood for a common human being. In the beginning of the story, before a formal introduction, Ralph was described simply as “a fair boy.” This already sets him out in a favorable light. Then it further describes how he is apparently good-looking and has the natural air of leadership. Of course, the conch played a big role when the kids voted him for leader, but his appearance played a large role as well. For the good first part of the book, Ralph has always symbolized leadership. As the story progresses and the kids became more and more distant from the idea of civilization, Ralph became more like a representation of common sense. Golding wrote, “‘I was chief, and you were going to do what I said. You talk. But you can’t even build huts-then you go off hunting and let the fire-’ He turned away, silent for a moment. Then his voice came again on a peak of feeling. ‘There was a ship-’” At this part, Ralph criticized Jack for not doing the necessary civilized things in favor of quenching his thirst for a hunt. As more and more of the kids become more and more uncivilized, Ralph became one of the last voices of common sense. When Simon and Piggy died, Ralph was the last one who retained that common sense and yearned for civilization. He had no leadership powers left anymore, and he stood for nothing more than a
He is the hero who is obsessed with keeping a fire going to find rescue. He sees the fire as hope and power nevertheless he didn’t properly sustain the flame. In the book we read many times of the fire become overwhelming or even just burning out. “We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued” said by Ralph himself on page 99. He truly believes that the fire is in his control. But the fire is in each and every one of them. They all act like fire under different circumstances. Ralph is symbolized by the fires presence itself. Because of his incompetence to preserve the flame and the other boys, Ralph never put Jack in his place or even took full control. He wanted balance and security. When the fire does go out Ralph does call an assembly but Piggy helps to keep him aligned and on topic. Ralph is the leader in power for most things but falls to a greater power. Like Ralph fire bows down to a greater power which usually is water, which symbolizes a higher wisdom. But even wisdom can be swayed by fear. When Sam and Eric let the fire burn out for a second time when they were running from the beast. They left their only chance of rescue because of fear. Ralph can’t keep all the boys aligned just like the fire. Ralph tries to be but doesn’t have power over everyone on the island. He is a symbol of fire when it is weak because of the other elements surrounding
Most people perceive children as being innocent, precious beings. Some believe that they are angelic. Put in the wrong situations though, they can become savage beasts. The innocence leaves their bodies and they are no longer precious. The survival of the fittest instinct kicks on and they can become killers. In the book Lord of the Flies the theme is that kids are not as innocent s they seem.
William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is about a group of boys stuck on an island not knowing what to do scared and afraid. These boys got stuck on the island from a plane that got shot down. Throughout the story the kids culture and behavior evolves and changes in different ways and in different people. As the culture of using the conch weakens, the boys become more savage.
Without authority and proper leadership, humans will wander off from the morals that they thought they had, and plummet straight into savagery. In the book, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a group of young boys between the ages of six to twelve get stranded on a deserted island. The boys try to build a functioning society in order to get rescued, but eventually, conflict occurs and the boys behave savagely, killing one another until they are rescued at the end. Golding’s view on humanity is that humans will naturally descend into savagery without society, rules, and authority. Jack and Roger’s nature prove Golding’s view as they are the main characters that descend into savagery and act sadistically. Although there are characters, like Ralph, who try to keep things on the island in order, they ultimately fail because savagery prevails.