Please post your thoughts and questions regarding 'Lord of the Flies' here.
Please post your thoughts and questions regarding 'Lord of the Flies' here.
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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SInce no one has started a thread like this yet, I'll start it,
I have succumbed to the boring library work hours and started this novel this afternoon... I read the cover flap so I have a basic sense and allready its astonishing what young boys can do...
The ermergence of Ralph as leader and calling the kid piggy even though he explicitly said not too reminds me of my brothers torturing me when i was a kid... it took me five or six years and three countries to fully get rid of one such name... Golding portrays the boys at the start as young boys... It'll be interesting to see how they change without any reall order, or how they'll create chaos and order
However I happen to be wondering, where are all the girls???
"It all comes down to what we make of ourselves, eh?"
-The Fairy Godmother
"Sing on, poor souls! The night is short, and the morning will part you forever!"
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
I read the book last May so I can't remember all the details but I guess at this time in the first part of the 20th century these boys were part of an all boys school and so there aren't any girls with them on the island.
*****************S P O I L E R*******************************
It's such a shocking piece of work really with the "little 'un with the mark on his face" disappearing and never reappearing (it's insinuated that he gets burnt alive when they start a forest fire) and then the decapitated pig's head on a stick talking to the schizophrenic Simon. "The Lord of the Flies" is the pig's head's name and translated into Hebrew or something it means Beelzebub (I got that from the Hutchinson Concise Encyclopedic Dictionary)! But it's such a dark disturbing piece that it's brilliant, utterly so because of how real Golding makes it seem. And the ending- phewf!
I liked the way the twins, Sam and Eric, were fused together metaphorically and the boys began calling them Samneric like one person. Not sure what that meant but it was interesting. And then Jack and Roger being the ringleaders for the savages. I forget who was the leader and who was the sort of warrior-assassin. Roger perhaps? Oh yeah, Roger was the bloodthirsty nutcase and Jack was the bad guy of the story as opposed to Ralph being the good guy leader.
What a great story. Well deserved winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature!
Last edited by Scheherazade; 02-05-2005 at 02:31 PM.
Please put a note to warn others when you are posting 'spoilers'. Some haven't finished reading the book and would like to do so without knowing the details. Thank you!
~
"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
~
why would you come to discuss the book if you haven't read it, i thought this was where you came once you'd finished it and wanted to discuss ideas and thoughts about the book
Some people could comment as they read and knowing the ending beforehand could spoil it for them.
I have a plan: attack!
yeah im only on the third chapter or so, yet posted the first comment...
SPOILER ********* second or third chapter, read past htat then go ahead and read this.....
When the Roger character started throwing rocks at the kid on the beach, it freaked me out, just like this guy is missing becuase society taught him to miss, did society teach him to throw anyway, is this just a natural kid thing or is he becomeing something else!!???!?
"It all comes down to what we make of ourselves, eh?"
-The Fairy Godmother
"Sing on, poor souls! The night is short, and the morning will part you forever!"
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
For me Simon was a metaphor to Jesus when he tries to tell the boys that the beast is within each of them, but Jack and his hunters kill him before he gets a chance to tell them what the beast is. At the end of the novel when Ralph was being hunted by the others and they finally gets help from the naval officer it seemed that the boys wouldn't be able to kill one another any more since they were on the ship. But would another ship kill all of them by the same way Jack and the hunters hunted Ralph? In the end this was a great novel. I was really drawn to Simon because of his advanced perception and how later he was sacrificed despite that he knew he would die.
currently in my world of insanity and randomism
Just started reading the book. Onto the second chapter yet!
I think mister_noel_y2k is right that the boys are a group of students from a all-boys school (there is a reference to school uniform in the first pages). Having said that, although the absence of the girls is explained in that way, I am at a loss to understand what Golding's original motive was. Maybe as we read on, we will be better informed.Originally Posted by Jester
Has anyone else noticed that the first thing the boys do is to get rid of their clothings, the first visible sign of civilisation? An omen for the turn things will take on the island?
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
~
I think I saw a documentary on William Golding and it said that while he was writing the novel he was working his day job at a boys' prep school in England. He would set them tasks and then while they worked he would work on his manuscript. They interviewed one of Golding's pupils and he said he and his friends all wondered what it was Mr Golding was working on while they did their sums and he found out later it was "The Lord of the Flies".
As for the clothes thing, yeah it's probably symbolic of the casting off of civilisation and a return to the more primitive ways of our ancestors and that the boys are becoming more savage, less sophisticated but then you forget that these are young boys on a sunny island where it's probably quite warm and clothes would just be uncomfortable. I'm not sure if the island is tropical or where it is geographically but they could just be taking off their uniforms because it's hot and the uniforms are uncomfortable.
And that comment someone made about Simon being a metaphor for Jesus, that was a brilliant insight, I never thought of it that way. As I mentioned before "The Lord of the Flies" is another name for Beelzebub, so when The Lord of the Flies and Simon are having that talk in the wilderness in a pseudo-dreamlike state, it's similar to when the Devil tried tempting Jesus when he was wandering in the desert for 30 days or something. Then Simon rejects The Lord of the Flies and goes in search of his friends and then Simon being sacrificed when he has something really important to say, that they needn't be afraid. Yeah, the Jesus metaphor is really insightful and interesting.
Someone has asked me why there are no girls. Here is my conjecture. It has been over 40 years since I read the book. I enjoyed it greatly, and tried next to read "The Spire" but at that age could not maintain my interest in "The Spire."
Perhaps "The Lord of the Flies" is all boys because, as I understand it,
in Golding's time, it was popular to have all boys schools.
In America, one may see old school buildings dating from the 1920's,
with an entrance on one side marked "Boys" and around the block, on
the opposite side of the building, and entrance marked "Girls."
Also, I suppose it is more suitable for Golding to have all boys, since it
eliminates the dimension of sexuality. Of course, in theory, there
could be some sexual expression between boys, but the novel seems
devoid of that. Perhaps, the quote below, about not crying for their
mothers, is something more suitable to boys than girls.
I shall try to devote more thought to this question, and post further at
the thread:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ead.php?t=3853
http://www.aresearchguide.com/lord.html
"They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been
expected; they were very brown, and filthily dirty." (from Lord of the
Flies)
In the gripping story a group of small British boys stranded on a desert
island lapse into violence after they have lost all adult guidance.
=============
William Golding's novel, "Rites of Passage" (1980) is completely different from Darkness Visible in style and tone, though many of the underlying themes are similar. A historical novel set in the Napoleonic era, it takes place entirely aboard a superannuated British battleship. The narrator is Edmund Talbot, an ambitious and selfish young nobleman on a voyage to Australia. The crux of the narrative is the death of another passenger, the parson Robert Colley, an unctuous parson who attaches himself to Talbot and becomes the butt of the crew's and captain's vicious jokes. Colley, though, is not all he seems. His letter of religious and amatory confession, discovered by Talbot, shows him to be another Jocelin or Matty, a man living in an intensely spiritual subjective world, who is only dimly aware of the promptings of his latent homosexuality. Colley is attracted to Billy Rogers, a corrupt, lecherous sailor whose name suggests a parody of Melville's saintly nautical innocent, Billy Budd. Eventually Colley has a sexual encounter with Rogers when drunk for the first time in his life. Full of inebriated joy he wanders out onto the deck half naked and urinates in full view of the crew and passengers. Upon recovering he realizes what he has done and seemingly dies of shame, which the ship's captain passes off as a “low fever”. Talbot tries to piece together what has actually happened below decks with Rogers, and never quite succeeds.
Last edited by Sitaram; 02-06-2005 at 12:08 PM. Reason: add Title
It was 40 days Satan tempted Jesus, and thank you for complimenting me.And that comment someone made about Simon being a metaphor for Jesus, that was a brilliant insight, I never thought of it that way. As I mentioned before "The Lord of the Flies" is another name for Beelzebub, so when The Lord of the Flies and Simon are having that talk in the wilderness in a pseudo-dreamlike state, it's similar to when the Devil tried tempting Jesus when he was wandering in the desert for 30 days or something. Then Simon rejects The Lord of the Flies and goes in search of his friends and then Simon being sacrificed when he has something really important to say, that they needn't be afraid. Yeah, the Jesus metaphor is really insightful and interesting.
currently in my world of insanity and randomism
It may be someone inaccurate or misleading to say that Satan tempted Jesus for 40 days. We know that Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days, and that during that time, Satan tempted Jesus. Was it three temptations? I must re-read. My memory often fails me nowadays.
Nonetheless it was the known time in which Satan tried to tempt Jesus. At this time Jesus was just baptised by John the Baptist. Satan was trying to make Jesus unholy or something....right?
currently in my world of insanity and randomism
Right! (since the forum software does not permit one word posts, I must embellish and inflate this to: indubitably, without question, most assuradly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Q.E.D., Amen)
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