"Ralph launched himself like a cat, stabbing, snarling, with the spear, and the savage doubled up." The Lord of the Flies by William Golding presents this character, Ralph, as trying very hard to fend for himself, even if it isn't in a conventional, civilized way. As shown in this example, people have been known to go to great lengths and to do things they would not ordinarily do to survive. For instance, Jack, a main character in the story, attacked another human, brutally and violently hunted an animal, and murdered a living, breathing person he was acquaintances with.
In the middle of this novel, a character you can assume is Jack attacked Ralph and a few other boys in the dead of night; Jack's reasoning for this was his need for fire. Golding writes, "A fist withdrew and came back like a piston, so that the whole shelter exploded in light" (Golding 167). The quote shows that since he was in need of fire, Jack was willing to hurt another person instead of just asking for help. His savage ways made him think that it was not necessary to ask permission, but that he could just take whatever he needed. Because there were none of the basic enforced rules in their current situation, he believed that he was allowed to do whatever he felt necessary to do to keep himself
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They were in desperate need of meat and the sow was their source of precious protein. When they seized her, Jack "was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Then (he) found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands." He even took it further, as the author wrote, "He giggled and flicked them while the boys laughed at his reeking palms" (Golding 135). This is definitely not something a sane human would act in a situation when they are covered in another once breathing animal's blood. The fact that he needed this meat for survival caused him to forget human morals and lead him to act completely