Literature Analysis #7

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

In the middle of a war, a plane, which was carrying young school children from Great Britain, gets shot down and crash lands in a desereted tropical island.  Ralph and Piggy, 2 of the main characters, assemble all of the kids to create rules and elect who will be the leader of the group.  Ralph is elected leader of the group, while Jack is elected hunter of the group.  Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon deicded to go on an adventure to see what is around the island.  The kids deicde to create a fire to try and signal passing ships. They succeed at making fire, but it soon burns out and enflames the forest of the island. At first the young boys enjoy the island because they had no parents to boss them around, but later they find out to be the worst thing that could happen to them. Meanwhile, Jack and his hunting team could not kill anything, and later Jack becomes preoccupied with the act of hunting. A ship finally passes by but the kids forgot to maintain the fire. As the story unfolds, the kids start to go against each other. Jack and hunters wanted to kill Ralph, they burnt the whole forest, where Ralph was hiding, which caused him to run out to the beach where the kids were waiting fo him to kill him. But as Ralph ran out of the beach a British naval officer was there to rescue the young boys.

One of the main themes of Lord of the Flies is loss of innocense. Loss of innocense means that once they crashed on the island, they were all well behaved kids wanting to be rescued and get off the island. But they turn into bloodthirsty hunters who careless of being rescued and brought back to their families.

The tone of Lord of the Flies is more dark, violent and tragic. This tone started towards the end of the book where the young boys transformed into bloodthirsty ravages. They didnt care about each other, all they wanted to do was kill one another.

Lord of the flies has many symbols. The conch represents society’s rules, politics, and speech. The fire represents of both hope of rescue and of destruction. The pighunts represent the shift of emotion and power of the boys, all they wanted to do was hunt and kill.  Imagery is also used in the book. The author kept talking about the "scar" that was left from the plane. This showed that there was already destruction at the beginning of the story.  Also the water that they bathed in was "warmer then blood". This showed how everyone will become bloodthristy.