Change in Understanding of the Lord of the Flies

          When we studied the novel back in term 1, I thought of it as a more cheerful and exciting setting that the boys were in. As the boys landed on the island after the plane crash, the island seemed like an idyllic setting due to the description of the beach and the terrain. The first assembly seemed interesting as the boys came together for the first time to see the different personalities of each character, with Jack being introduced as a rather fierce and domineering character. Piggy was portrayed as a weak and gullible kid, physically inferior. Ralph was portrayed as a comparatively more outspoken character but mild-mannered, and seemed like a boy-next-door kind of person.

However, as we progressed further into the novel, I notice that the boys started to part to different sides, where their true characters were unveiled. Ralph gave me an impression of one who would think in the perspective of the littluns and act for the good of the group. He matured as they stayed longer on the island, and became much more intelligent compared to at the start. Piggy also seemed more of an intelligent character that was outcasted by the hunters because of his physical disability.  They started to despise him and saw him as an irrelevance, an example being when Jack punched him in the stomach, breaking one of the lenses of his glasses, used to light fires. Jack and the rest of the hunters, along with some littluns, revealed their true nature without the conditioning of society, when they started to turn to savagery. They killed a pig and started chanting like uncivilised children, and were not disgusted by the blood of the pig, untypical of regular children.

After Chapter 3, when tension between Ralph and Jack was triggered after Ralph confronted Jack, and later argued about their differing priorities between rescue and hunting, two distinct sides began to show up. Ralph, Piggy and Simon remained civilised but were suffocated by the strength of the other group of boys that became rather savage. One side was civilisation, order, organisation, and understood the importance of rescue as their top priority, while the other, was for the boys to get what they wanted to satisfy their own ill, innate desires, such as overpowering an inferior being, namely a pig. By the end of Chapter 5, the side with civilisation and regulations as their stand began to break down due to the amount of support for savagery, and also due to the innate selfishness  and ill-disciplined behaviour that Golding was trying to show in every human being.

My understanding of the novel has changed significantly, from an exciting and bright impression to a very complex, and untypical of a novel of boys stranded on an island. An easy-going life for the boys would be what I expected in the beginning, with the boys managing to survive and eventually get rescue smoothly. However, Lord of the Flies is very different from the expectations that I had, as the boys go through a very harsh time on the island, with many conflicts sparking up, where savagery takes over young children to the extent that they kill one another.