Jack Vs. Piggy In William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

Jack vs. Piggy: Freud’s Model of the Psyche Applied to Lord of the Flies The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud developed a theory that divides the human psyche into three parts: Id, Ego, and Superego. In the novel Lord of the Flies, author William Golding reflects Freud’s model in the main characters of the story. Lord of the Flies is the story of a band of schoolboys from various prestigious Catholic schools that get stranded on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific. The boys elect Ralph as “chief”, and he tells them that they need to build shelters and keep a signal fire going on the top of the mountain. Jack Merridew, the leader of the choir boys, is upset that he wasn’t elected leader and as a result gets to remain the leader of his choir, the designated hunters on the island. Jack becomes obsessed with hunting and begins to ignore what Ralph tells him to do in order to have fun hunting and dancing. Piggy, a fat boy with glasses and asthma, is another significant character in the story. Piggy is the source of many of the good ideas on the island, although he rarely gets credit for them. For the duration of the story, he tries to stand up to Jack and remain by Ralph’s side. The three parts of Freud’s theory are represented in Lord of the Flies by the

Jack was Id because he was motivated solely by his desire to hunt and be the leader. Superego was best represented by Piggy, the intelligent, logical one. And Ego was none other than Ralph, the leader and the boys and the one whose job it was to decide between these two points of view. In the end, Ralph inevitably chose Id, because Jack was so powerful and determined that he murdered Piggy, along with all the ideals that constitute the Superego portion of the psyche. This left Ralph with no other choice but to abandon his ideals and try to survive.