Lord of the Flies by William Golding: Final Thoughts

Lord of the Flies was a very well-written and thought-provoking book. It showed how young boys, the picture of innocence, when left alone, can become savages. They started as a group of kids trying to make sense of their situation, and they slowly descended into savageness. I would love to give you many grisly examples of this, but you'll just have to read the book yourself. I would recommend this book to just about anyone. It provides readers with some of the most basic facts about human nature.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding: Quote (page 70)

"Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet."

      This quote displays how old and mature Ralph has become. Kids don't usually consider life as wearisome. Also, Golding mentions that people spend much of their life watching their feet.I don't think I completely understand this, but it really makes you think. And that's what I really like about this quote.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Passage 3 (page

     A nearer cry stood him on his feet and immediately he was away again, running fast among thorns and brambles. Suddenly he blundered into the open, found himself again in that open space—and there was the fathom-wide grin of the skull, no longer ridiculing a deep blue patch of sky but jeering up into a blanket of smoke.

     It is only mentioned briefly in this passage, but this was the point when I realized what the pig skull symbolized. Here's a quick back story to get you caught up: The boys thought there was some kind of island beast, so they killed a pig and put its head on a stick as an offering to the beast. It attracted a lot of flies, so it was called the "Lord of the Flies." I wondered for a long time why Golding would decide to name the book after such an unimportant character (if you can even call it that).
     When I read this passage, I saw that the pig was jeering at the smoke from the fire that covered most of the island. I realized that it represented the decline into insanity that the island had brought to the boys. When they came to the island, they were a bunch of well-mannered kids, but after a while, they become savage killers. In this way, the skull's jeering sums up everything that happens in the book.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Passage 2 (page 41)

     “–and them little ’uns was wandering about down there where the fire is. How d’you know they aren’t still there?”
     Piggy stood up and pointed to the smoke and flames. A murmur rose among the boys and died away. Something strange was happening to Piggy, for he was gasping for breath.
     “That little ’un–” gasped Piggy– “him with the mark on his face, I don’t see him. Where is he now?”
     The crowd was as silent as death.
     “Him that talked about the snakes. He was down there–” A tree exploded in the fire like a bomb.Tall swathes of creepers rose for a moment into view, agonized, and went down again.

     In "Lord of the Flies," Piggy is a symbol of wisdom and sense. This passage is an example of a time when he was the only one who thought about all aspects of a situation. Everyone else just thinks about the fact that there's a big fire, but Piggy is the one who brings up the fact that it may have been deadly. Golding carefully chose his words to imply that the death really happened. He says that the murmur "died away" and later that the crowd was "silent as death." Coincidence? I think not.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Passage 1 (page 38-39)

     “I said before we’ll be rescued sometime. We’ve just got to wait, that’s all.”
     Daring, indignant, Piggy took the conch.
     “That’s what I said! I said about our meetings and things and then you said shut up–”
     His voice lifted into the whine of virtuous recrimination. They stirred and began to shout him down.
     “You said you wanted a small fire and you been and built a pile like a hayrick. If I say anything,” cried Piggy, with bitter realism, “you say shut up; but if Jack or Maurice or Simon–”
     He paused in the tumult, standing, looking beyond them and down the unfriendly side of the mountain to the great patch where they had found dead wood. Then he laughed so strangely that they were hushed, looking at the flash of his spectacles in astonishment. They followed his gaze to find the sour joke.
     “You got your small fire all right.” Smoke was rising here and there among the creepers that festooned the dead or dying trees. As they watched, a flash of fire appeared at the root of one wisp, and then the smoke thickened. Small flames stirred at the trunk of a tree and crawled away through leaves and brushwood, dividing and increasing. One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel. The smoke increased, sifted, rolled outwards. The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards. Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke, the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. Acres of black and yellow smoke rolled steadily toward the sea. At the sight of the flames and the irresistible course of the fire, the boys broke into shrill, excited cheering. The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock. They flapped at the first of the trees, and the branches grew a brief foliage of fire. The heart of flame leapt nimbly across the gap between the trees and then went swinging and flaring along the whole row of them. Beneath the capering boys a quarter of a mile square of forest was savage with smoke and flame. The separate noises of the fire merged into a drum-roll that seemed to shake the mountain.
     “You got your small fire all right.”

     This is a pretty long passage, but I really liked it. There's a lot going on. First of all, it's evident that the conch is used as a symbol as authority, because Piggy needed to have it before he spoke. Also, it's obvious that Piggy cares about rules and order. Normally, someone who had been insulted would speak immediately, but Piggy chose to wait until he had the conch to speak. Next, it is shown that Piggy gets little respect from the group. (The very first time this is shown is earlier in the story, when people don't even bother learning his name, and they just call him "Piggy.") This is clear because people don't bother listening to him. To make this abundantly clear, Piggy says "You say/said shut up..." twice in quick succession. Even if he has a good idea, it is ignored until somebody else mentions the same idea.
     The next thing I really liked about this passage is the explanation of the fire. Golding uses strong image-creating words like "flash," "wisp," "crawled," "sifted," "eating," "rolled," and "laid hold" to make it feel like you are actually watching the fire happen. He also uses a simile to compare flames to a squirrel, and later to a jaguar.
     The final thing I found amusing about this passage was Piggy's use of understatement. He says "small fire" 3 times, as if to mock the other boys for letting the fire get out of hand.

1984 by George Orwell, Final Thoughts

I really liked reading 1984. It had a lot of twists and turns, and showed me something I had never thought about. It showed how a government can make people ignorant by outlawing books (in a more deep way than Fahrenheit 451). They also kept people under constant surveillance to make sure they didn't do anything wrong. One of the most interesting concepts I notice was that there weren't really any laws, other than "you cannot commit thoughtcrime." Thoughtcrime, simply put, means going against the government. People who committed thoughtcrime were taken to the "Ministry of Love" where they were tortured until they believed that everything they knew was a lie, and that the government was there to help them and make their life better (see passage 2). In 1984, the government controlled everything, from the clothes people wore to history itself. They even had a "Ministry of Truth" which was dedicated to changing old newspapers, history textbooks, and magazine articles to make it look like the government (or "The Party, as it is called in 1984) was always right. Party members had to master the concept of "doublethink," which was to simultaneously believe two conflicting ideas, so they could know that they are changing history, while also believing that the "new history" had always existed. But I don't want to give too much of the book away. 1984 has a little something for everyone. It's for anyone who likes a good romance, a tragedy, a mystery, or just a book about futuristic government.

1984 by George Orwell, Quote: (page 126)

"To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available." 

     I think Orwell was talking about more than the people in 1984 when he said this. These days, it seems a lot of people live that way, "spinning out a present that [has] no future." People just live their life the same way every day, slowly getting older, slowly dying. Orwell probably noticed that, and decided to put in into this book.

1984 by George Orwell, Passage 3 (page 96-97)

     "A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently...
The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston’s, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze."

     This passage talks about war prisoners coming through London, where Winston lives. At first, when I was reading this, I wondered why Orwell would spend so much time explaining the prisoners in such detail. Then I realized that the prisoners could be symbols of Winston, and all the residents of Oceania, for that matter. First, Orwell mentions the wooden-faced guards. This is much like the Thought Police, who are constantly watching Oceanians. Orwell also mentions the fact that they are close together, and that they are utterly incurious. A parallel can be drawn there, too, because most of the citizens live in small apartments, and don't have an inquisitive nature: they usually just accept everything about life. Also, the leg-irons may represent the strict rules of the government. Later, Orwell states that the prisoners' faces are dirty and exhausted, which is a pretty good description of Winston. Orwell then tells that some prisoners looked into Winston's eyes "with strange intensity," (as if to say "we aren't as different as you think we are"). The last description of a prisoner is of one who was "used to having [his hands] bound together." This sort of sums up the state of society in 1984, because people have gotten so used to the opressive government that they don't even seem to care any more. I may be looking way into this, but I think that Orwell was saying that Winston was just as much a prisoner as the men in the trucks.

1984 by George Orwell, Passage 2 (page 208-209)

     "‘Do you know where you are, Winston?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.’
‘Do you know how long you have been here?’
‘I don’t know. Days, weeks, months — I think it is months.’
‘And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’
‘To make them confess.’
‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’
‘To punish them.’
‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?’"

     This passage is a dialogue between Winston and O'Brien, who has been torturing Winston. O'Brien is explaining to Winston that the torture is not simply punishment, or to make Winston say anything, but to change Winston completely. The object is to make him into a new person with a new mindset. To change everything he believes in a way that he will truly want to be loyal to the government. Orwell shows that the torture has been long and that it has been messing with Winston's mind by saying that Winston doesn't know the difference between days and months while he is at the Ministry of Love. Additionally, O'Brien believes that this is good and right. He shows this by using words like "cure,: "change," and "we care." O'Brien is trying to slowly convince Winston that he is wrong, and O'Brien is right.

1984 by George Orwell, Passage 1 (page 46)

     He turned around. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department... he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary...
     "You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston," he said almost sadly. "Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak.I've read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"...
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten... Every year fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

     Here, Orwell uses a character named Syme to explain that in the world of 1984, one of the ways the government is controlling the minds of its citizens is creating a new type of language with fewer and fewer words every year. People's vocabularies are getting smaller and smaller until they can't help but think the way the government wants them to, because they don't know how not to. Throughout his monologue, Syme has a quite excited tone, which shows how he is oblivious to the damage that he is causing to not only the current citizens of Oceania, but the future generations. He has been blinded by the government and convinced that he's doing everyone a favor by saving them from unnecessary intelligence.