Loss Of Knowledge In Lord Of The Flies

Rishabh Mohan
Miss Shah
Freshman Accelerated English
10 May 2023

Don't ‘Bee’ Ignorant: The Value of Access to Information

Without the Internet or easy transportation, accessing information becomes a lot harder. In the case of a Bee-infested apocalypse, where there’s little life except for The Flies, information is hard to come upon, preventing the spread of knowledge. In the book “Electric Kingdom'' by David Arnold, a lack of access to knowledge increases the difficulty of survival for the characters because a person will never know what they’re missing until they learn of it, alongside knowledge of the outside world being necessary for survival. While it can be said that access to all knowledge leads to useless information that wastes

By figuring out new things, the holes in a person’s previous knowledge can be filled, making survival and understanding concepts easier. This idea is clarified further in the later half of The Electric Kingdom, when Lakie escapes captivity. After Lakie and the gang escape from Waterford, she tells the gang about how she survived the business of Flies. Lakie hid away in her sleeping bag, “Big Alma”, which was made of a “Seventy-five-denier ripstop nylon shell,” using “Insotect Tubic construction.” She goes on to say that “Big Alma saved [her] life.” (Arnold 321). Without the sleeping bag, Lakie wouldn’t be able to survive the Flu Flies, or not as easily as she did in the story. If she didn’t learn of the specifications of the sleeping bag, she wouldn’t have hidden in the sleeping bag as the Flies might break in. The action of avoiding her sleeping bag makes surviving much more difficult as the sleeping bag was the most obvious way to escape,

These tidbits of information are crucial to know in order to stay safe in the wilderness of New Hampshire. Gathering resources is one example of a task that requires survival skill and knowledge. Echo, for example, “went hunting” in order to get food supplies (Arnold 218). He learnt how to hunt from his “mother”, who “taught him” the trade (Arnold 220). By hunting, Echo was able to provide food for his family, and later on, himself. Knowing how to hunt is an important piece of knowledge to survive in the wilderness, as it provides an easy source of food. With access to hunting knowledge, food can be easily gathered, making survival in the woods easier. The inverse effect can also be seen, where a lack of knowledge or access to it makes finding food, and subsequently survival, harder. A more mystical version of this occurs with the Deliverer’s “Red Books” (Arnold 35). Whenever she learns something new, The Deliverer will “write” it down to “never forget” (Arnold 35). The Deliverer writes down whatever she finds necessary to survive, as she thinks the tip will prevent the issue that happened in her life from happening in the next life. The Deliverer writes down the information she learns in an attempt to maintain some knowledge of the outside world for her future lives, as she herself knows that the information is necessary to survive and let others survive the apocalypse.