Q1 - The Characters

The two main characters of The Lord of the Flies are Ralph and Jack.

Ralph, the protagonist of the whole story, is the ideal leader who considers humanity and morality very important. From the start of the story he is elected leader because of his ability to remain calm, steady, and make rational choices. He is a responsible character who is one of the very few boys that try to maintain a civilized manner of living. I like Ralph very much, partly because he attempts and practically succeeds in acting like he would in a society that has adults and humanity, but also partly because Ralph discovers and despairs at the evil that lurks within people including himself. Ralph regards moral highly, therefore he is more and more depressed at the violence that belongs in the core of so many people. Ralph represents the conscience of most people who grow up in a civilized society.

The antagonist of this story is Jack, who is practically the very opposite of Ralph. Jack is described as a boy who wishes to be a leader from the start of the story. He likes the feeling of having power. Jack becomes a hunter who is eager for blood within a short period of time, and he is the leading example of the boys who give in to the savagery that lurks within them all. I dislike Jack, for he loses all the ethical values of a civilized human very quickly. By the end of the book, Jack is a demoralized savage who pursues power, bloodshed, and killing. Jack ends up like this mostly because he finds that the power of being able to harm others makes him feel more superior and stronger than other people. For his love of being better than anybody else, Jack later on decides to kill Ralph as the symbol of his own power over the isalnd and the other boys.

Another quite important character in the story is Simon, who is the sole character in this book that is shown as a truly 'good' person. Simon follows Ralph, is kind to the little boys, and shows himself as a rather peculiar boy. He seems to be physically weak, where he once has a seizure right after he 'meets' the Lord of the Flies. Simon, unlike Ralph and Piggy, believes in the true value of goodness from the bottom of his heart. He was the first one of all the boys to realize that the beast that the boys feared so much might exist inside their hearts. Ralph and Piggy, even though shown as the civilized type, only acts morally because they were raised to do so. They both have the potential of savageness, which showed up on the fateful night of Simon's death. Simon, on the other hand, shows no signs of forged moral or hidden violence, which was why I took a liking to him. However, Simon is killed by the other boys, which represents how the little true goodness of the world perishes under the hands of the evil of all humans.

Piggy, another central character, is a poor boy who is teased and bullied from the start of the book. Piggy is often targeted as a useless, fat victim of teasing.However, he shows great loyalty to Ralph, a deep longing to return to the society of civilization, and he is an extremely logical boy. As he stands by Ralph's side no matter what he develops into an important cahracter, later to be killed by the savageness of humans. By the end of the book, Piggy is stated as a true, wise friend. However, even though Piggy is a rather likeable fellow, he also shows the trace of violence and savageness during the night of Simon's death.

There are other few characters in the story who take a big part in the story. Roger, the eager follower of Jack, also quickly gives in to the glee of harming others and feeling superior. He shows this early in the book when he throws rocks at another little boy without actually hitting him. Later on, Roger's savageness is fully awakened when he starts to enjoy throwing rocks at Piggy, soon succeeding in killing him. Another character would be the officer who appears at the end of the story. He is the only adult to show up in the whole book, and he represents the adult society which the boys can finally return to, but never be the same again.

The last character, or rather, existance in this book is the Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Flies if represented as the rotting head of a sow, which is a female pig, stuck on a stick. This head is symbolic in its own way. Jack and his followers kill the sow and stick its head as a sacrifice for the beast that they think exists on the island. Later, Simon starts to hallucinate and communicate with the dead head, which is renamed as the Lord of the Flies. The Lord talks to Simon, and is horrifyingly realistic. In this scene, the Lord of the Flies represents the 'beast' that the boys imagined, and at the same time it is the beast inside the boys. The Lord of the Flies is also the very main point of the entire story: the evil that lives in the hearts of men.