I have read ‘Lord of the flies’ from William Golding. It was published by Faber and Faber in 1982.
Summary
A plane crashes and only a couple of boys survive it. Ralph and Piggy, two of the surviving kids, meet at the beach of an uninhabited island. They find a conch shell which they blow to attract the other boys on the island. They call an assembly and the boys choose Ralph as their leader. Jack wanted to be the leader as well so Ralph makes him the leader of the hunters. They decide to go on an expedition and Ralph, Jack and Simon find out that they are on a deserted mountain and that they can make a fire on the top of the mountain. They make the fire to warn passing ships that they are there. They use Piggy’s glasses to start the fire. They make the fire too big and it burns down the forest on the mountaintop. A little boy is missing and he has probably been killed by the fire. But because they haven’t counted all the boys they ignore that. Ralph and Simon build huts on the beach while the little boys play on the beach and the hunters are trying to kill a pig. They forget to keep the fire going and Ralph is very angry at them because he saw a ship at the horizon. The hunters start painting there faces with clay and that excites them very much. They start acting like savages while they hunt and they have some sort of dance in which one of the boys plays the pig and the others stand around him and hit him. Then, the little boys, and later also the bigger ones, start to talk about a beast, and they are very afraid. Ralph and Jack don’t believe that there is a beast. At night when Sam and Eric are supposed to watch the fire, a dead parachutist drops on the island. Sam and Eric were sleeping when the parachutist landed on the island but they hear the parachute and see a sitting thing and they are very afraid. They go back to the rest of the boys and tell everyone what they have seen. Jack and Ralph go looking for the beast to kill it but when they get there and see the sitting creature they run away. Jack and his group don’t except Ralph as their leader anymore. They go to another beach where they have a party with roasted pork. Piggy suggests to make a fire on the beach and Ralph orders to do it. Meanwhile, Simon goes to the top of the mountain and sees that there was no beast. He goes to Jack’s beach but when he crawls out of the bushes, the savages think he is the beast and they do their dance with him and they kill him. The savages go to the castle rock and Jack rules like a tyrant. He warns his tribe against Ralph and Piggy. During the night he goes to Ralph’s camp and there is a huge fight in which Jack steals Piggy’s glasses. In the morning Ralph, Sam, Eric and the practically blind Piggy go to Jack’s camp and try to reason with him, but this meeting ends in a fight between Jack and Ralph. Sam and Eric are taken prisoner by the hunters and Piggy is killed by a giant boulder, which one of the boys pushed down a rock. The conch he has been carrying is now broken. Ralph escapes from Jack and is hiding. The next morning the boys are hunting him and he runs for his life. A fire started by the savages spreads over the whole island. Ralph runs to the beach and there stands a naval officer who has come to rescue them. One by one the boys come out of the forest and they all start crying.
The story takes place on an island in the Pacific Ocean. There is a beach, a lagoon, a mountain, a castle-shaped rock and a jungle. In the rest of the world there is a war going on and there has been an atomic attack on England. The story takes place in the future.
Main characters
Ralph is 12 years old. He is a schoolboy and he is the leader of the group.
Ralph is a very wise boy. He tries to build up a democratic society. He tries to make sure that the boys stay civilicised. He wants everybody to listen to him because he is the leader. If they don’t listen to him he gets angry and starts yelling. He thinks a lot about how to be a good leader. His biggest problem is that they don’t listen to him. They don’t help him building the huts and they only want to play in the sea. Later his problem is that all the other boys want to kill him and they are hunting at him.
Ralph is the only one who is a bit nice to Piggy. He tries to be friends with Jack by making him the leader of the hunters. I felt most connected to Ralph because he did most of the things like I think I would do them.
Piggy is also 12 years old. He’s very fat and he wears thick glasses.
Piggy is the most intelligent boy on the island. The other boys don’t like him en won’t listen to his good ideas. Piggy supports Ralph’s leadership the most and he tries to give him advice. He keeps reminding Ralph to keep the fire going, or else they won’t be rescued. At the end he gets very angry at Jack because he’s tired of being bullied and Jack broke his glasses. I felt really sorry for Piggy because he is the smartest, but he can’t show that because he’s fat and he wears glasses.
Jack is older than the rest of the boys. He is the leader of the hunters and later of the savages. In the beginning of the book Jack seems normal. He wants to be the chief but when Ralph becomes the chief he seems to agree with it, because he can be the leader of the hunters. Then, he becomes more and more evil. He encourages the other boys to do savage things. Under his influence, the other boys change from normal into barbaric creatures.
Jack doesn’t like Piggy and Ralph. He breaks Piggy’s glasses and refuses to give him any meat. He has some respect for Ralph in the beginning but later he orders the savages to kill him. I didn’t like Jack since the beginning because he has a big mouth and is only interested in power and hunting.
‘Lord of the flies’ is a future fiction novel. The book shows that in all human beings there is evil and it comes out when the rules on which society is based no longer prevail.
The title, ‘Lord of the flies’ is a pig’s head which Jack and his troop have placed on a stick as an offer for the ‘beast’.
The story is told by an all-knowing author. He can enter the minds of the characters, but he stays very objective. The writer doesn’t use difficult words, so I found the story easy to understand. The structure is very clear, because it is told in chronological order.
I like the subject of the book because I always watch ‘Expeditie Robinson’, which is about a group of people trying to survive on a deserted island. There are always irritations and fights between the people there. In this book there were only little boys, and no grown-ups and the fights got out of hand. Because I could compair the show and the book it amused me a lot.
Although the book is old, it is also very topical. In the book the boys do things in a group, which they would never have done when they would be on their one, just like it often happens with vandalism these days.
I have seen in this book that you can make clear that someone speaks with an accent by only little changes. The boys say ‘me’ instead of ‘my’, they also say ‘we was’. The smaller boys are called the ‘littluns’, a contraction of ‘little ones’.
I found it special that in this book there were no grown-ups, only little boys. I also never read about murdering little boys before.
I learned about myself that I can better stand cruel books than I thought. When I was younger I couldn’t stand unfair things, but now I can take more distance from the characters so it doesn’t affect me that deeply any more.