Roger Kill Piggy

Most people know that boys always create trouble, but they do not realize this trouble can be deadly. This may seem like an exaggeration, but in Lord of the Flies by William Golding one of the characters, Roger, takes his actions to the extreme. Roger and several other boys including a boy named Piggy have crashed onto an uninhabited island without any adults. Roger ends up being in a tribe lead by a boy named Jack Merridew. This tribe has gone into savagery and is killing animals such as the wild pigs on the island. Piggy chooses not to join in the savagery and confronts the tribe in order to try and regain his recently stolen glasses. Roger intentionally releases a rock that knocks Piggy onto a rock that breaks open his skull. Roger reveals

In an article discussing what creates a killer, it brings up the important point that, “Blaming one’s environment or even a mental illness paints the offender as a victim, he writes, and research on genetic links to criminality has been inconclusive” (Beller 1). Since the research on this has no stable scientific foundation it cannot be said that Roger killed Piggy because of his genes or his experience on the island. Also Roger was not harmed or brutally murdered like Piggy so Roger can not be labeled a victim by saying that it was the environment. If this were the case any murderer could be considered the victim or even innocent. To add on to this view the same article states, “In his book, Inside the Criminal Mind, Dr. Stanton E. Samenow argued that regardless of their background, criminals think differently than non-criminals—that they make a choice to commit a crime, and should be held fully responsible for their actions” (Beller 1). This is especially true with Roger. He acted alone and differently compared to the other boys on the island. All the other incidents with the boys were done together with mob mentality in which they all drove each other to do it, but Roger had no assistance and only his own murderous ideas and decisions. When Roger starts to carry out his plan it states, “High overhead, Roger, with a sense of delirious abandonment, leaned all his weight on the lever” (Golding 180). Roger is away from all of the other boys without anyone or anything to influence him. He abandons what is around him and acts on his own preferences. He does not hesitate and he puts all of his effort into making the rock kill Piggy. No one else had the idea to kill Piggy. As the article stated earlier, he thought in the opposite way compared to other characters. He made his own choice so he should be punished for