preview

Lord Of The Flies: Piggy's Character Change

Decent Essays

In situations of disaster, chaos, or stress, some people recount the feeling that they lost “part of who they were” during the incident. Some people describe that “they will not be able to see the world the same again.” In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a group of boys gets thrown into this somewhat cliché, depressing situation of being stranded on an island. This situation arises stress, fear, and madness among the boys. This causes several characters in the book to experience a loss of their character throughout the book that leads to the creation of a new individual for each boy. Ralph, the main protagonist of the story, has a physical and mental change of character. His physical change of character regards his descent to …show more content…

Piggy stays somewhat static as a good and civilized boy, like some others (e.g. Simon). However, Piggy’s character change involves his entitlement of civility and his specific separation from the rest of the boys. “‘Like kids!’ he said scornfully. ‘Acting like a crowd of kids!’” (38). This quote exhibits Piggy’s nature of judgment over the other boys’ rashness and establishes his entitlement over the other boys early on. This creates a barrier of sorts, as Piggy might not feel tempted to interact the same way because he is “better than that.” Piggy is also directly characterized as the outsider of the group: “There had grown up tacitly among the biguns the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labor” (65). In a sense, Piggy is separated from the overall group of boys by his physical and character traits. Piggy also has this emphasized character trait of being myopic. Once Piggy’s specs are destroyed, not only is Piggy literally blind but symbolically as well. This, in turn, means the group is also blind, as Piggy was the only character that seemed to provide a substantial amount of rational thinking and ideas. This leads to irrational thoughts to flow free, like Jack’s ideology of madness and

Get Access