Completely unrelated, but the classic Lord of the Flies is . . . .really concerning. Like I'm really concerned for William Golding's mental state right now.
--SPOILERS BELOW--
Anyways, though. There are two main issues I have with the book. One, it's 100% inaccurate. According to these articles, the beginning of Lord of the Flies did happen. It's just, well, the rest of it that didn't. Instead of being obsessed with hunting and killing each other, the boys worked together and created their own (civilized) society. When one boy broke his leg, the others took over for him until it healed.
Huge contrast from let's-offer-Ralph's-head-to-the-beast.
And then there's my other issue with it. In chapter 11, Golding states that "Piggy sat expressionless behind the luminous wall of his myopia." However, the entire rest of the book disputes this notion. As all of us who've read the book know, Piggy's glasses were used, multiple times, to start fires. In order to do this, the lenses would have to be able to focus light to a point - something achievable only through convex lenses.
Or a system of mirrors and lenses, but we don't talk about that.
Anyways, myopia, or nearsightedness, is corrected using concave lenses, which, instead of focusing light, scatter it. So, either Piggy is hyperbolic, or the boys would have never been able to start the fire. In conclusion, Golding Really Needs To Do His Research.
As you may or may not be able to tell, I really enjoy pointing out the inconsistencies in, well, basically anything.
Is it weird, though, that I'm in love with chapter 11? Like, yeah, Piggy dies, but it's so well-written I can't help but love it.
And in a way, it does reveal a bit into human nature - maybe not for young children, but for people as a whole.
Take Roger, for instance. It's pretty clear that he gets off on violence and exercising control over others, but we don't really fully realize to what extent that's true (I didn't, at least). Right before he drops the rock on Piggy, he sees Ralph as “a shock of hair and Piggy a bag of fat” (180, at least in my copy). He's so easily able to dehumanize these two boys - boys who, it could be argued, are the most concerned for the safety of the group - and in doing so, opens himself up to a world of violence. Dehumanization is, after all, the first step to savagery.
As he kills Piggy, he is elated to the point of "delirious abandonment" (180) and becomes someone respected (or feared) by even Jack. He descends "as one wielding a nameless authority” - in essence, he has become the hangman, he has become the one who makes all totalitarian systems effective (182). Within Jack's subculture, he's free to do whatever he pleases.
In doing so, he symbolizes the end of civil society. As the rock slams into Piggy, "The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist” (181), effectively destroying the last two remnants of civilization. Throughout the novel, the conch has symbolized order and discipline, and Piggy intelligence and reason, giving the words "ceased to exist" a sort of double meaning - they refer to both the physical entities of Piggy and the conch, but also to all remaining vestiges of civilization. Roger destroys these two things in one blow, emphasizing how quickly savagery can bring down a society.
And then there's chapter 12, which is SO GOOD. The irony!
When the navy officer comes to rescue the boys, he's bewildered, saying that "a pack of British boys . . . . .would have been able to put up a better show than that" (201-2). This echoes Jack's statement way back in chapter 4 - "We’re English, and the English are best at everything.” In both cases, they demonstrate their biases. These two statements automatically assume that non-Britons are savage and that Britons are better than that, which history has demonstrated is very much not the case. War is seen as noble when we're the ones waging it, yet our opponents, who are often much less violent than us, are seen as savages.
And then my favorite irony of the chapter. The officer, looking upon the island, makes an offhand remark: "fun and games" (200). He doesn't quite realize how right he is. This savagery, the death and violence and control, is exactly the kind of fun the Lord of the Flies told Simon would occur in chapter 8. Even more ironically, he doesn't understand that he, as a member of the military, is part of his own fun and games. As Ralph weeps for his friends, the officer allows "his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance" (202), in yet another instance of irony. The officer thinks he's taking the boys to a land of peace, yet trim cruisers are ships of war. He doesn't know it, but he's only taking the boys from one war to another. All these ironies come together to emphasize the extent to which violence and war is ingrained in our society such that it's considered play, and even peace.