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Lord Of The Flies Decisions

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In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, young british boys are left stranded on an island, no way of escape other than hoping that a passing ship will spy their smoke signal, after their plane crashed. At first they are ecstatic at the freedom of having no adults and relish the opportunities they have on the island. Quickly, they realize that life on the island is not the all fun and games. The older kids, especially Ralph, Jack and Piggy, make decisions and lead the way. The children form a group and implement a democracy with Ralph as leader, Piggy as advisor and Jack as leader of the hunters. When Jack breaks off to create his own group with most of the older boys a deep divide forms. Ralph’s group focusing on being saved and …show more content…

As proved in the last paragraph, the boys start of civilized they know what is right and wrong. It starts out with not taking responsibility for their actions, the boys never say what they are doing is wrong and it needs to stop. When Robert is pretending to be the pig and gets hurt they all try to make excuses and it escalates from there. Another small but important change is the hunters painting their faces. First, this allows them to catch pigs which is the first step into killing and savage, Jack and Roger realize how much they enjoy asserting their dominance over other living beings and causing pain. But it also allows them to become something else, cease to be civilized british boys and become savages, not having to own up for their actions. A critical shift is when Jack dounces the rules, ““Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong—we hunt! If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down!”(91). This leads to all of the boys, expect Piggy and Ralph, dancing around, unable to be controlled by democracy or any form of government, out of control, not doing violent acts, just out of control. One sad change is with Percival, as mentioned earlier he knew his whole name and address but when he forgets his name at the end. Another vital shift is when Jack presents the group two choices, democracy, civilization, and rescue with Ralph or savagery, chaos and hunting with Jack, none of the boys vote for Jack but follow him anyways. This illuminates that the boys know that following Jack is bad and don’t even tell Ralph that they are leaving but make a choice to leave anyways. This choice choses lack of accountability and chaos over civilization. This represented by hunting versus keeping the fire. fire represents rescue and reaching a hand out to civilization, civilization is about progress and fire was one of man’s greatest inventions. While hunting is diving away from the

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