Click here to access genius.com's electronic copy of Lord of the Flies.
You will be able to read through each chapter, clicking on specific passages to access a range of annotations and deeper thoughts on Golding's language. It's a really great revision resource and should help you put together some detailed revision notes.
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These images are word clouds that track the frequency of the words used in each chapter. It's a really useful resource that allows you to see the most important themes, characters and events in each chapter. Image taken from Shmoop
Roger is pure evil. Sadistic, unabashed, total and utter evil. At first monitored by society, Roger's true intentions towards his fellow humans are unleashed when he realises that society no longer has influence in his new world. Most chilling is our first encounter, where Roger throws stones at the littluns with an intention to miss - not because he doesn't want to hurt them, but because he doesn't want to get into trouble for doing so. Roger and Jack are both evil characters, but where Jack does offer benevolence at times to the boys (usually when they appease him), Roger simply does. not. care. It is Jack's rule that unleashes Roger's sadism, culminating in murder, with a sharpened stick up a pig's bottom along the way. (Take into account this act at the time of publication and it becomes even more shocking). The part Roger plays is in direct contrast to that of Simon. Where Simon is pure and good, Roger is impure and evil. Where Simon protects, Roger destroys... even when it comes to people. ***SPOILER ALERT*** Taken from Cliffsnotes: Roger represents the sadist, the individual who enjoys hurting others. His evil motives are different from Jack's, who pursues leadership and stature and enjoys the thrill of the hunt. Roger just likes to hurt people. He is described in Chapter 1 as a boy "who kept to himself with avoidance and secrecy." His secret is that he is, in some ways, more evil than even Jack. All his life, Roger has been conditioned to leash or mask his impulses. The "irresponsible authority" of Jack's reign offers him the chance to unleash his innate cruelty. Initially, in a mean-spirited prank, Roger throws rocks at the unsuspecting littlun, Henry, but he throws them so that they miss, surrounded as Henry is by "the protection of parents and school and policeman and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by . . . civilization." Once he joins Jack's tribe, he has lost that conditioning and eventually kills Piggy with one boulder, which was not intended to miss. Roger carves out a distinct niche in the tribe as the hangman, the torturer who plays a key role in all dictatorships, and relishes the role of a killer. From his point of view on top of Castle Rock, "Ralph was a shock of hair and Piggy a bag of fat" — not other human beings. Mentally dehumanizing those not in his group frees Roger from the restraints of decency, an effect he feels as "a sense of delirious abandonment" when he releases the rock to kill Piggy. Image taken from Shmoop
Simon is pure, worthy and authentic. He is shy; he hides beneath his black fringe and he avoids confrontation - but he is integral to the operation of a calm and well-organised island. Simon represents religion and enlightenment - he is surrounded by nature and goodness (most notably the white "candle" buds in the clearing) and is the only one who truly meets The Lord of the Flies and talks to him (although mainly, The Lord of the Flies just taunts him). A fainter, weak and weary, Simon is physically inferior to the rest of the boys. However, mentally and spiritually, he is much better - and he is punished quite horrifically for this. All of Simon's thought and questions are abstract; he asks the questions others cannot, partly due to his maturity and partly due to his higher-level thoughts - for example "what else is there to do?" Simon may pass you by if you don't read closely, so be careful - he is a pivotal character. ***SPOILER ALERT*** Taken from Cliffsnotes: Simon's role as an artistic, religious visionary is established not only by his hidden place of meditation but also by the description of his eyes: "so bright they had deceived Ralph into thinking him delightfully gay and wicked." While Piggy has the glasses — one symbol of vision and truth — Simon has bright eyes, a symbol of another kind of vision and truth. Simon is different from the other boys not only due to his physical frailty, manifested in his fainting spells, but also in his consistently expressed concern for the more vulnerable boys. Littluns follow him, and he picks choice fruit for them from spots they can't reach, a saintly or Christ-like image. He stands up for Piggy and helps him get his glasses back when Jack knocks them off his head, another allusion to Simon's visionary bent. In addition, he has a secret place in the jungle, where he spends time alone. Simon's loner tendencies make the other boys think he's odd, but, for the reader, Simon's credibility as a mystic is established when he prophesies to Ralph "You'll get back to where you came from." Simon reaches an abstract understanding of mankind's latent evil nature and unthinking urge to dominate as "mankind's essential illness." When Simon tries to visualize what the beast might look like, "there arose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick" — Golding's vision of humanity as flawed by inherent depravity. Golding gives this knowledge to an outsider like Simon to reflect the place visionaries or mystics typically hold in society: on the fringes, little understood by the majority, and often feared or disregarded. Like other mystics, Simon asks questions the other boys cannot answer. His questions to them, "What's the dirtiest thing there is?" and "What else is there to do?" require both abstract thought and courageous action to answer. In contrast to Piggy and Ralph's equating adulthood with knowledge and higher understanding, Simon sees the darker side of knowledge. For him, the staked sow's eyes are "dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life," a view of adults not defined by the civilized politeness and capability the boys imagine. Yet Simon soldiers on in his quest to discover the identity of the beast on the mountaintop because he sees the need for the boys to face their fears, to understand the true identity of the false beast on the mountain, and to get on with the business of facing the beast within themselves. By courageously seeking to confront the figure on the mountaintop, Simon fulfills his destiny of revelation. He doesn't get to share his revelation with the other boys because they are not ready to accept or understand it. Instead he dies as a result of being made the scapegoat for the boys' unshakeable fear. When Simon's body is carried off by the tide, covered in the jellyfish-like phosphorescent creatures who have come in with the tide, Golding shifts the focus from Simon's body's movements to the much larger progressions of the sun, moon, and earth because Simon represented a knowledge as fundamental as the elements. Image taken from Shmoop
A poor, overweight science buff with asthma was never going to be a heart-throb. Piggy is everything the boys like to mock - he doesn't even have parents - but then, whoever really wants to listen to the right thing when you're only 12? Representing science and reason, Piggy is the sensible voice on the island. Calling out the arguments, looking after the littluns and reining in Ralph - he's the matriarch of the island's family (even though he is a boy). Beneath his plump exterior, Piggy is caring, sensible and practical - and a definite asset to the island. Even when he isn't trying to help, he inadvertently does - for example, when his glasses are used to start the signal fire. Piggy would be one of the climate-change-aware scientists in today's society. It's just a shame it had to come to an end. ***SPOILER ALERT*** Taken from Cliffsnotes: Piggy is the intellectual with poor eyesight, a weight problem, and asthma. He is the most physically vulnerable of all the boys, despite his greater intelligence. Piggy represents the rational world. By frequently quoting his aunt, he also provides the only female voice. Piggy's intellect benefits the group only through Ralph; he acts as Ralph's advisor. He cannot be the leader himself because he lacks leadership qualities and has no rapport with the other boys. Piggy also relies too heavily on the power of social convention. He believes that holding the conch gives him the right to be heard. He believes that upholding social conventions get results. As the brainy representative of civilization, Piggy asserts that "Life . . . is scientific." Ever the pragmatist, Piggy complains, "What good're your doing talking like that?" when Ralph brings up the highly charged issue of Simon's death at their hands. Piggy tries to keep life scientific despite the incident, "searching for a formula" to explain the death. He asserts that the assault on Simon was justifiable because Simon asked for it by inexplicably crawling out of the forest into the ring. Piggy is so intent on preserving some remnant of civilization on the island that he assumes improbably enough that Jack's raiders have attacked Ralph's group so that they can get the conch when of course they have come for fire. Even up to the moment of his death, Piggy's perspective does not shift in response to the reality of their situation. He can't think as others think or value what they value. Because his eminently intellectual approach to life is modeled on the attitudes and rules of the authoritative adult world, he thinks everyone should share his values and attitudes as a matter of course. Speaking of the deaths of Simon and the littlun with the birthmark, he asks "What's grownups goin' to think?" as if he is not so much mourning the boys' deaths as he is mourning the loss of values, ethics, discipline, and decorum that caused those deaths. Image taken from Shmoop
Oh, Jack. Jack, Jack, Jack. With his angry, frizzy red hair (symbolism much?) and his face that is "ugly without silliness", Jack is the complete antithesis of our golden-haired hero, Ralph. Beginning as a bossy choir leader, Jack's evil first shows its face when he refuses to allow his choir to remove their gowns, despite the blistering heat of the island. Later on, Jack's true savagery comes to the fore when he decides that killing a pig to eat is the most important thing on his to-do list. At first, he wavers - can he really stick a pig? Jack represents autocracy and dictatorship on the island, but not true, unabashed evil. Oh, no. If you think Jack is bad, wait until you meet Roger... ***SPOILER ALERT*** Taken from Cliffsnotes: Jack represents evil and violence, the dark side of human nature. A former choirmaster and "head boy" at his school, he arrived on the island having experienced some success in exerting control over others by dominating the choir with his militaristic attitude. He is eager to make rules and punish those who break them, although he consistently breaks them himself when he needs to further his own interests. His main interest is hunting, an endeavor that begins with the desire for meat and builds to the overwhelming urge to master and kill other living creatures. Hunting develops the savagery that already ran close to his surface, making him "ape-like" as he prowls through the jungle. His domain is the emotions, which rule and fuel his animal nature. The conflict on the island begins with Jack attempting to dominate the group rather than working with Ralph to benefit it. He frequently impugns the power of the conch, declaring that the conch rule does not matter on certain parts of the island. Yet he uses the conch to his advantage when possible, such as when he calls his own assembly to impeach Ralph. For him, the conch represents the rules and boundaries that have kept him from acting on the impulses to dominate others. Their entire lives in the other world, the boys had been moderated by rules set by society against physical aggression. On the island, however, that social conditioning fades rapidly from Jack's character. He quickly loses interest in that world of politeness and boundaries, which is why he feels no compunction to keep the fire going or attend to any of the other responsibilities for the betterment or survival of the group. The dictator in Jack becomes dominant in his personality during the panic over the beast sighting on the mountain. In trying to get Ralph impeached, he uses his rhetorical skills to twist Ralph's words. In defense, he offers to the group a rationale that "He'd never have got us meat," asserting that hunting skills make for an effective leader. Jack assigns a high value only to those who he finds useful or agreeable to his views and looks to silence those who do not please him. Denouncing the rules of order, Jack declares, "We don't need the conch any more. We know who ought to say things." He dictates to his hunters that they forget the beast and that they stop having nightmares. As Jack strives to establish his leadership, he takes on the title of "chief" and reinforces the illusion of station and power by using the other boys ceremoniously as standard bearers who raise their spears together and announce "The Chief has spoken." This role is no game for him, though; by the night of Simon's death, Jack has clearly gone power-mad, sitting at the pig roast on a large log "painted and garlanded . . . like an idol" while "[p]ower . . . chattered in his ear like an ape." His tribe addresses him as "Chief," indicating a form of more primitive tribal leadership. True to Piggy's assertion that "It's them that haven't no common sense that make trouble on this island," Jack takes an entirely different direction from logic or common sense. Perhaps acting out of some guilt he is unable to acknowledge, Jack becomes paranoid and begins feeding misinformation to his tribe, a typical practice of dictatorships to control the collective thinking by controlling the information that is disseminated. Given the thrill of "irresponsible authority" he's experienced on the island, Jack's return to civilization is conflicted. When the naval officer asks who is in charge, Jack starts to step forward to challenge Ralph's claim of leadership but is stopped perhaps by the recognition that now the old rules will be enforced. Image taken from Shmoop
Ah, Ralph. The golden-skinned, lithe boy with the fair hair who has a tendency to stand on his head when he's excited. Just your normal twelve year-old, then. Ralph is the key protagonist of the novel. His appearance literally reflects his role as a democratic and just leader - he is "fair" both in nature and appearance. Juxtaposing Jack, Golding purposefully presents Ralph as a good-looking boy, with strength and sporting prowess. The hidden message seems to be that democracy is a favourable style of leadership. Ralph hangs out with Piggy, although this is against his will at first, and later on, is because he really has no choice. All Ralph wants to do is build shelters, find water, make a signal fire and go home. Simple, right? ***SPOILER ALERT*** From Cliffsnotes: Ralph represents leadership, the properly socialized and civilized young man. He is attractive, charismatic, and decently intelligent. He demonstrates obvious common sense. Ralph is the one who conceives the meeting place, the fire, and the huts. He synthesizes and applies Piggy's intellectualism, and he recognizes the false fears and superstitions as barriers to their survival. He is a diplomat and a natural leader. Ralph's capacity for leadership is evident from the very beginning (he is the only elected leader of the boys). During the crisis caused by the sight of the dead paratrooper on the mountain, Ralph is able to proceed with both sense and caution. He works vigilantly to keep the group's focus on the hope for rescue. When the time comes to investigate the castle rock, Ralph takes the lead alone, despite his fear of the so-called beast. Even in this tense moment, politeness is his default. When Simon mumbles that he doesn't believe in the beast, Ralph "answered him politely, as if agreeing about the weather." British culture is famed for civilized reserve in emotional times. By the standards of the society he's left behind, Ralph is a gentleman. Having started with a schoolboy's romantic attitude toward anticipated "adventures" on the island, Ralph eventually loses his excitement about their independence and longs for the comfort of the familiar. He indulges in images of home, recollections of the peaceful life of cereal and cream and children's books he had once known. He fantasizes about bathing and grooming. Ralph's earlier life had been civilized, and he brought to the island innocent expectations and confidence until certain experiences informed his naiveté and destroyed his innocence. As he gains experience with the assemblies, the forum for civilized discourse, he loses faith in them. "Don't we love meetings?" Ralph says bitterly, frustrated that only a few of the boys actually follow through on their plans. Over time, Ralph starts to lose his power of organized thought, such as when he struggles to develop an agenda for the meeting but finds himself lost in an inarticulate maze of vague thoughts. Ralph's loss of verbal ability bodes ill for the group because his authority lies in the platform, the symbol of collective governance and problem solving where verbal communication is the primary tool. Ralph's mental workings are subject to the same decay as his clothing; both are frayed by the rigors of the primitive life. Yet in response to the crisis of the lost rescue opportunity, Ralph demonstrates his capacities as a conceptual thinker. When "[w]ith a convulsion of the mind, Ralph discovered dirt and decay," he is symbolically discovering humankind's dark side. At the same time, he has learned that intellect, reason, sensitivity, and empathy are the tools for holding the evil at bay. Ralph's awareness is evident when, realizing the difficulty of this lifestyle in contrast to his initial impression of its glamour, he "smiled jeeringly," as an adult might look back with cynicism on the ideals held as a youth. Although he becomes worn down by the hardships and fears of primitive life and is gradually infected by the savagery of the other boys, Ralph is the only character who identifies Simon's death as murder and has a realistic, unvarnished view of his participation. He feels both loathing and excitement over the kill he witnessed. Once Ralph becomes prey, he realizes that he is an outcast "Cos I had some sense" — not just common sense but a sense of his identity as a civilized person, a sense of the particular morality that had governed the boys' culture back home. When Ralph encounters the officer on the beach at the end of the book, he is not relieved at being rescued from a certain grisly death but discomforted over "his filthy appearance," an indication that his civility had endured his ordeal. In exchange for his innocence, he has gained an understanding of humankind's natural character, an understanding not heretofore available to him: that evil is universally present in all people and requires a constant resistance by the intellect that was Piggy, by the mysticism and spiritualism that was Simon, and by the hopes and dreams that are his. The SparkNotes pages on Lord of the Flies are some of the most detailed revision materials I've ever seen - a gift for anyone studying the novel. The novel is broken down into sections:
The quizzes are an invaluable resource when revising the novel; make use of them! You can find the pages here or by clicking on the image above.
Look. I'm a firm believer in not watching the film version of anything until you've read the book. There are a number of reasons for this, but most notably, a book is like an iceberg. What you see on the surface - the characters, the events, the plotline - are one layer of the book, but so much depends on your own personal ideas and views that a film simply isn't enough. The layers dig so deep beneath the surface that you need to really sit down with it, read it and pull it apart. Watching a filmed version of a book is a bit like reading the revision guide - it can give you the basic ideas, but it can't tell you what to think.
Saying that, I understand that many of you like the concrete nature of a film and the fact that it allows you to picture the characters in your head. I'm not going to argue with that. However, there are two versions of Lord of the Flies, and I just know you'll be instantly attracted to the full-colour, modern-looking one from the 90s. DON'T WATCH IT. It's nothing like the novel and you'll end up confused and, worse, quoting the wrong thing in your exam. Instead, this version, which is older than my mum, is actually faithful to the novel and, if you can get over the fact you're watching something that's over 50 years old, is actually quite good. I think I could get over you watching this one before reading.
Here, you have two choices:
This is a clear revision video that outlines the plot of Lord of the Flies. Be warned - this is not a book about boys having fun on a desert island. No; this is an allegorical novel about the frailty of the human condition and how man can be corrupted in the absence of society and the rules attached to it. Golding wanted to make the reader aware of the fragile nature of the society we have worked so hard to build, in addition to providing a warning to the reader about what can happen when a dictatorship is allowed to take over. Never has this novel been more relevant in my lifetime. It's one of my favourite novels of all time and I hope you love it too. Fun fact: In England, we pronounce the name of the shell "consh". It's actually pronounced "conk" in the US, and you can eat the animal from inside. It's delicious fried. Allegorical Novel: From allegory; "a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one." |
In a Nutshell...During a nuclear war, a group of boys are stranded on an island after their plane crashes during an evacuation. In the absence of adults, the boys work together in order to create their own, crude version of society. However, when you're only 11 and everyone wants to be in charge, how will it end? ArchivesCategories |