William Goulding Lord Of The Flies Quote Analysis

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“Lord of the Flies”, a modern gothic novel by William Goulding, displays three diverse and significant lessons throughout its story line. In the novel Goulding introduces the questions; If power is issued by vote, how easily can it be lost? How will those who receive power use it? And how good battles evil. Goulding chooses these three main morals to explain to the reader how they can go either way depending on who or what takes control and how they develop these factors develop. If power is issued by vote, how easily can it be lost? This is the first lesson Goulding introduces in his novel “Lord of the Flies”. This lesson is brought to attention when a group of choir boys survive a plane crash on a deserted island and choose to elect leaders. The group of boys decides to elect two individuals; Ralph a well-organized, intelligent young man and Jack a savage, controlling boy with …show more content…

William Goulding develops Ralph as a very conservative character; Jack as an aggressive one. Ralph is conservative because of the way he handles his power; he handles it by being polite and just asking, developing himself as someone the boys can step all over. Nothing wrong with the way Jack is but he isn’t strict enough with the boys, he doesn’t give them an ‘if you do not do it then this will happen,” he just gives them the “hey let us do this.” Ralph does not need to be threatening to get the boys to help him and develop a society on the island, he just needs to tell them “if you help me and we get our work done correctly, there will be positive results.” Jack did what Ralph did not, he was aggressive toward the choir boys but too hostile. Jack made his power scary and threatening, therefore the boys listened to him to fend for their lives. Those boys who angered Jack suffered the consequences and lost