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                This is a blog created for our Literature holiday homework . We are supposed to post different chapters of the Lord Of The Flies. So i guess im gonna post soon!


 Introduction to LOTF:

-Plot Overview:
       A group of boys are on a jungle island without any adults. Ralph and Piggy found a conch shell . The conch represents to gather the other boys for meetings. Ralph was th chief. Jack made fun of Piggy by calling him fat and didnt agree on Ralph being the chief. Ralph and the other boys then explore the island.

      During the meetings,they had to set up rules in order to get them organised. Ralph suggested to build a signal at the top of a mountain in order to get the passing ships to rescue them from the island.They used Piggy's spectacles to light up the fire.

-Main Characters:
      Ralph,Jack,Piggy,Simon

-Setting of Story:
     A deserted island


  Author's Background :

-William Golding's life:
       Golding's novel has been rejected for 21 times by other publishers in 1953. In 1954,his book was finally published as Lord of the Flies. He won several awards such as James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, and the Booker Prize in 1980. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  

- Motivations and reasons for writing the novel:
         He decided to follow his father;s footsteps in teaching Englis and philosophy. It served as an inspiration for Lord Of The Flies novel. 



  Chapter 7:

  
                By this point, the conflict between Ralph and Jack has escalated to a real struggle for power, as Jack’s brand of violence and savagery almost completely replaces Ralph’s disciplined community in the boys’ conception of their lives on the island. Ralph’s exhilaration in the hunt and his participation in the ritual that nearly kills Robert is, in a sense, a major victory for Jack, for the experience shakes Ralph’s confidence in his own instinct toward morality and order.

               As befits a power struggle in a savage group, the conflict between Ralph and Jack manifests itself not as a competition to prove who would be the better leader but instead as a competition of sheer strength and courage. Just as Ralph boldly climbed the hill alone to prove his bravery in the previous chapter, Jack goes up the mountain alone now. It is also significant that Ralph discovers nothing, while Jack discovers what he thinks is the beast: while Ralph does not believe in the beast, the beast constitutes a major part of Jack’s picture of life on the island.

Chapter 8:

             The excitement the boys felt when Jack suggests killing a littlun in Chapter 7 comes to grotesque fruition in Chapter 8, during the vicious and bloody hunt following Jack’s rise to power and formation of his new tribe. Jack’s ascent arises directly from the supposed confirmation of the existence of the beast. Once the boys, having mistaken the dead parachutist for a monster, come to believe fully in the existence of the beast, all the remaining power of civilization and culture on the island diminishes rapidly. In a world where the beast is real, rules and morals become weak and utterly dispensable. The original democracy Ralph leads devolves into a cult-like totalitarianism, with Jack as a tyrant and the beast as both an enemy and a revered god.

             We see the depth of the boys’ growing devotion to the idea of the beast in their impalement of the sow’s head on the stake as an offering to the beast. No longer simply a childish nightmare, the beast assumes a primal, religious importance in the boys’ lives. Jack uses the beast ingeniously to rule his savage kingdom,
and each important character in Lord of the Flies struggle to come to terms with the beast. Piggy, who remains steadfastly scientific and rational at this point in the novel, is simply baffled and disgusted. Ralph, who has seen what he thinks is the beast, is listless and depressed, unsure of how to reconcile his civilized ideals with the sight he saw on the mountaintop. But the most complex reaction of all comes from one of the novel’s most complex characters—Simon.

 Chapter 9:

              With the brutal, animalistic murder of Simon, the last vestige of civilized order on the island is stripped away, and brutality and chaos take over. By this point, the boys in Jack’s camp are all but inhuman savages, and Ralph’s few remaining allies suffer dwindling spirits and consider joining Jack. Even Ralph and Piggy themselves get swept up in the ritual dance around Jack’s banquet fire. The storm that batters the island after Simon’s death pounds home the catastrophe of the murder and physically embodies the chaos and anarchy that have overtaken the island. Significantly, the storm also washes away the bodies of Simon and the parachutist, eradicating proof that the beast does not exist.


             Jack makes the beast into a godlike figure, a kind of totem he uses to rule and manipulate the members of his tribe. He attributes to the beast both immortality and the power to change form, making it an enemy to be feared and an idol to be worshiped. The importance of the figure of the beast in the novel cannot be overstated, for it gives Jack’s tribe a common enemy the beast, a common system of belief , a reason to obey Jack,and even a developing system of primitive symbolism and iconography,


Chapter 10:


             In the period of relative calm following Simon’s murder, we see that the power dynamic on the island has shifted completely to Jack’s camp. The situation that has been slowly brewing now comes to a full boil: Jack’s power over the island is complete, and Ralph is left an outcast, subject to Jack’s whims. As civilization and order have eroded among the boys, so has Ralph’s power and influence, to the extent that none of the boys protests when Jack declares him an enemy of the tribe. As Jack’s power reaches its high point, the figures of the beast and the Lord of the Flies attain prominence. Similarly, as Ralph’s power reaches its low point, the influence and importance of other symbols in the novel—such as the conch shell and Piggy’s glasses—decline as well.

             As Ralph and Piggy discuss Simon’s murder the following morning, Ralph clutches the conch shell to him for solace, but the once-potent symbol of order and civilization is now useless. Here, Ralph clings to it as a vestige of civilization, but with its symbolic power fading, the conch shell is merely an object. Like the signal fire, it can no longer give Ralph comfort. Piggy’s glasses, the other major symbol of civilization, have fallen into Jack’s hands. Jack’s new control of the ability to make fire emphasizes his power over the island and the demise of the boys’ hopes of being rescued.


Chapter 11:

         In the chaos that ensues when Ralph’s and Jack’s camps come into direct conflict, two important symbols in the novel—the conch shell and the Lord of the Flies—are destroyed. Roger, the character least able to understand the civilizing impulse, crushes the conch shell as he looses the boulder and kills Piggy, the character least able to understand the savage impulse.

         As we see in the next chapter, Ralph, the boy most closely associated with civilization and order, destroys the Lord of the Flies, the governing totem of the dark impulses within each individual. With Piggy’s death and Sam and Eric’s forced conversion to Jack’s tribe, Ralph is left alone on the island, doomed to defeat by the forces of bloodlust and primal chaos.

Chapter 12: 

 
           After Ralph’s tense, exciting stand against the hunters, the ending of Lord of the Flies is rife with irony. Ralph had thought the signal fire—a symbol of civilization—was the only way to lure rescuers to the island. Ironically, although it is indeed a fire that lures a ship to the island, it is not an ordered, controlled signal fire but rather the haphazard forest fire Jack’s hunters set solely for the purpose of killing Ralph. As we have seen, Ralph has worked tirelessly to retain the structure of civilization and maximize the boys’ chances of being rescued.

          Now, when all he can do is struggle to stay alive as long as possible, a an improbable or unexpected device or character that suddenly appears to resolve a situation appears, at the last possible moment, in the form of the naval officer who brings the boys back to the world of law, order, and society. Golding’s use of irony in the last chapter blurs the boundary between civilization and savagery and implies that the two are more closely connected than the story has illustrated. Ultimately, the boys’ appalling
savagery brings about the rescue that their coordinated and purposeful efforts were unable to achieve.


Thoughts and Feelings:

Sejal:
   
  In general,I feel that this book theme is based on savegery and how a group of decent and innocent school boys can turn into murderous and somehow carnivore's savages.This book has actually changed my perception of humans. This book depicts that no matter how young or innocent you are,circumstances will cause you to change behaiviour and it may not always be a good behaiviour as it can be a cruel one like in this book.

Dinah:

I feel that this book has made me changed the way i think about humans. Different humans will react differently towards the challenges they face. For example based on this book,Jack became more savage in the later part of the novel. He was too into hunting for pigs.The boys ate food that caused them to get bad stomach ache in order to survive. In general I feel that as the boys got more savage. 




Sources:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_Kingdom_%281945%E2%80%93present%29
http://www.biography.com/people/william-golding-9314523#death-and-legacy