Essay, Research Paper
Characters Representing Society Groups in William Golding s Lord of the Flies
Golding made each character represent a social group in Lord of the Flies . Piggy represents the thinker and Jack is the bully. They are two main characters that play significant
roles in demonstrating Golding s ideas about society as a whole.
When Golding told us, what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy, but the most obvious leader was Jack. , we learned that Piggy had been characterized as the brain of the
group. We can also infer from this statement that Piggy held little or no political clout, and could not get others to follow his instructions. For example, when he tried to take names of the boys
after Ralph left, they merely wandered off without taking notice of Piggy s commands. He is portrayed as the thinker — and not the doer. Golding s characterizations of his physical appearance and inabilities do not assist him in gaining any leadership of the group. His need to please Ralph is another weakness that eroded any power his intelligence might have given him with the group. Piggy was teased and quickly turned into the outsider by one of his own
overzealous attempts to win the favor of Ralph. Piggy represents the thinker, who in real society is often surpassed by the doer. Golding shows how Ralph uses Piggy only on selective occasions, while other times he simply leads or joins the tormenting. Ralph becomes elected chief of the group, while Piggy was merely a secret assistant behind the scenes. Thinkers cannot get anything done without doers, and this is directly shown and proved in the book by the characterizations of
Piggy and Ralph.
Society has its weak members, like Piggy, and the strong, like Jack. Jack knows how to get what he wants and his preferred method is bullying. He is constantly threatening and frightening those underneath him which gives him a tremendous supply of power, and Jack is most certainly power-craving. Golding shows that Jack can command and get results, but if his demands are not met then he shows no restraint upon using violence to achieve them. He soon developed an amazing taste for violence. The need to hunt for survival became not only for meat, but for the kill. drags the others down with him in his hunts, and the follower s soon sink to the level of savages more willingly than not, as Jack had earlier on. He transformed the others to ridicule Piggy and treat those who were not part of their tribe with violence. As a general statement, Jack ridicules those who are weaker or simply not like himself, just as bullies are known for. Golding proves him a bully when he smashes one of Piggy s lenses and this is clearly Jack s victory of violence over intelligence.
I have learned a lot about how authors can express their opinions symbolically through fictional characters and ideas from this book. Golding s work has been deciphered and pulled apart by many philosophers and experts in the past and it will mos t certainly regarded as a literary masterpiece of hidden meanings and representations in the days yet to come.