Lord Of The Flies Conch Quotes

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What would you do if you were stranded on an island? Do you think you’ll survive? In the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding there is a lot of representation and symbolism, whether it be a person in the book or an object or even an emotion. The conch in the book is used to gather everybody's attention, if you have the conch only you can speak. The conch represents authority. A quote from the text states, “ ‘I got the conch! Just you listen!’ ”{Golding, 45} In this quote Piggy was trying to get everybody's attention so he grabbed the conch and used it. The conch aponits everybody the authority figure in the moment, and who they should be listening to. Since the conch represents authority, when the conch is broken all authority has been …show more content…

After the conch is broken it is spoken by Jack that the conch is gone in a wildly manner, he then proceeds to stab Ralph with a spear. The conch represents a certain jurisdiction for these boys and as soon as that's lost so is that line they don’t cross. The line gets blurred and they can no longer see it. However, there is more symbolism in this book; such as ‘the monster’ representing the lurking and growing evil in human nature. " ‘What I mean is... maybe it's only us.’ " {Golding, 107} In this scene they are debating whether the beast is real or not and Simon says that it's not. Simon believes that there is no monster, but the fear that these boys are feeling is real. The beast continues to grow within their mind, but now they are taking action on what they believe to be the beast. In the text it states, “At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore.” {Golding, 187} In this scene Simon found the supposed ‘monster’ and realized that it was just a dead pilot, afterwards he fainted and started to growl to inform the others of his