The Major Characters And Their Roles In Lord Of The Flies

“Lord Of The Flies” is a novel about a group of young boys who get stranded on an island after a plane accident and need to depend on one another to get help. They are a group of older boys called ‘biguns’ and younger boys called ‘littluns’. Piggy, Ralph, and Jack symbolizes the significance in society. Ralph becomes the chief and battles a great deal with Jack to be boss while Piggy stands uninvolved being the brains behind the chaos. In spite of the fact that these three characters were a piece of a similar island, they all contributed major roles to society.

Piggy speaks to astuteness and realism his entire novel. Continually thinking before he settles on choices and being faithful to Ralph regardless. Even after the young boys take credit for every thought of his, he yearns to be a piece of their gathering and for them to like him. No matter how hard Piggy tries to stand up for himself, the boys would always find a way to make fun of him and ignore as if he doesn’t even exist.We never know what Piggy’s real name is because when he meets Ralph, he discloses to him that every boy from school would ridicule him and call him ‘Piggy”. Ralph started to laugh and clap his hands when he heard this and later on told all the other boys to call him by that even after Piggy advised Ralph not to tell the others. The boys start to yell Piggys name and “[a] storm of laughter arose and even the tiniest child joined in…[Piggy] went very pink, bowed his head, and cleaned his glasses again”(Golding 21) shwoing how weak Piggys is as he was not able to stand up for himself or stand up to Ralph and argue with him on why he would tell the others. Piggy may represent weakness in “Lord Of The Flies” but he is extremely loyal to his friend Ralph and never leaves his side through this whole novel. Piggy grew tired of all the boys being mean and hurtful to him and Ralph and had enough when they started to throw rocks at them. He argued with the boys, “Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is?” (Golding 180) representing once again how Piggy will stay by Ralph’s side no matter what.

Ralph symbolizes request, initiative, and development. He takes the first step of responsibility by being the leader of their group and trying to get food for them by telling Jack and his choir to be hunters. All the boys on the island met after Ralph blew the conch to gather everyone and hold their first meeting where they decided there should be a chief, “Him with the shell. Ralph! Ralph! Let him be chief with the trumpet-thing. Ralph raised a hand for silence”(Golding 22) demonstrating Ralph’s first sign of leadership throughout the novel and caring for a group of young boys. In society, there must be someone who will take authority and unite people otherwise there would be chaos and it would lead to anarchy. Ralph tried to be civilized but it was merely impossible when Jack decided he wanted to run the island his way, and his way only. Ralph developed during the novel as in the beginning, he was just a young boy who wanted to be rescued and civil about things. Towards the end he was no longer a young boy but someone who had lost all innocence and had seen things no child should see.

Jack is all the viciousness or malice in man. He loses his capacity to stay acculturated while he is stranded on the island. He becomes dehumanized and shows little to no remorse after seeing and killing two young boys who he went to school with. Jack’s first attempt at killing a pig failed and he wanted to avenge himself by killing any pig he sees and not let anyone or anything get in the way of that. After his first kill of a pig, he transformed into someone the people of the island would not recognize. He was a ruthless killer. The first time Jack murdered a pig, he was exceptionally happy and the biguns began to play a round of catch the pig where they used Maurice as the pig and the boys would chase him around and holler, “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in”(Golding 75) showing the first time the boys started to turn into savages. No matter how much people would deny it, in society there will always be evil within us. When they finally get rescued from the island, Jack regretted everything with at long last observing a grown-up figure and couldn’t come with words to tell the official he was “chief”.

“Lord Of the Flies” reminds us how wicked people can be even when we attempt to be cultivated, wickedness will discover a way to corrupt our minds. With everything taken into account, Piggy demonstrates how innocent we can be. Ralph demonstrates how we are leaders and how enlightened we could be on the off chance that we utilize our brains. Jack demonstrates us how cruel and unfeeling we can be without having any remorse and at last, regretting every last bit of it.

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The Psychological Consequences of Trapping Young Boys on an Island

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies follows the narrative of an airplane crashing into an uncharted, uninhabited island, of which the impact quashes the lives of all adults on board and leaves behind a young group of English boys to fend for their survival. Ralph and Piggy are the first two characters to interact, and per Piggy’s input, Ralph blows on a conch shell as a method to signal all the boys from the island; the first show of power. And following this event, when electing the leader of their new island “society,” they elect Ralph. The main character conflict arises between Ralph and Jack, the latter adamant that he becomes the leader against the majority vote, over who should be “chief.” As time passes and the desire for meat grows, Jack and his choir become hunters for the rest of the boys, allowing their predatory instincts a free rein. Descending into a savagery-induced madness, Jack becomes more and more outspokenly disapproving of Ralph’s methods of leadership and forms his own tribe on the other end of the island, and as the boys slowly begin to leave Ralph and Piggy for Jack, all semblance of order or civilization are eventually lost to the craze of the pig hunt. Golding depicts not only the boys’ struggle to survive, but also the psychological functioning that leads the boys to abandon the values society had tried to imprint in them. Through characterization, conflict, and setting, Golding’s novel explores the idea of a society corrupted by basic instinct.

Sigmund Freud, psychologist and founder of psychoanalysis, was the pioneer that established that the human conscience consists of three distinctly unique compartments: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id requires, demands that the basic, carnal needs that man is born with be satisfied and fulfilled regardless of the situation and its context; the pleasure principle, in other words. The ego, however, holds an innate understanding for the desires and needs of other people, and for the possible repercussions that bottomless selfishness may instigate; the reality principle, in contrast, that comes after the first few years of life. The needs of the id have to be met, so the ego assures the id is satisfied while still taking the reality into consideration; meanwhile, the Superego is a compartment of the mind that is developed throughout the adolescent years as the moral and ethical values that dictate the belief of right and wrong. These different states of consciousness are, uncannily, represented each by a main character in Golding’s world. Jack being the id is the most clear of the three, as Jack does not really carry out decisions in his underlings’ best interest, nor does he truly adhere to any specific moral or ethical code. There is a point in the novel when Piggy is attempting without much success to reinstate order where Jack blurts, “Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong – we hunt! If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat” (91). He sets up a mutually exclusive paradigm where strength and rules are antithetical to each other, whereas Piggy, the ego, sees them as related. Jack takes advantage of the fear of the beast to satisfy his thirst for violence, representative of the id. Jack’s reasoning involves very selfish motives. His desire to be rid of the beast is bolstered entirely by his want to kill; he does not care that his decision may have potentially spelled doom for the other boys. He no longer recognizes the ludicracy of the beast. In favor of his basic instinct to hunt, Jack has neglected the reality.

Piggy, the voice of logic and the voice of discipline amongst the boys, represents the ego. He constantly tries to reason with the other boys, and when he and Ralph first meet, Piggy understands the needs to find and help the younger boys, expressing his concern by saying, . “We got to find the others. We got to do something”. While Jack is obsessed with hunting for meat and does not think in the long term, Piggy convinces Ralph that shelters are imperative if they want to survive, but they fail to relay this practicality to the others. As so often happens when the ego and id are pitted against each other, the id overpowers with its instinctual force and desire for instant gratification. As Freud wrote in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932), ‘The poor ego has a…harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three…The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.’ In Golding’s world, Piggy, too, has a hard time of it. His glasses symbolize his ability to “see” or comprehend the bigger picture, the goal of their survival, and he is the mediator between the group and Simon, the character who represents the superego. Simon represents the superego because he adheres to the principles instilled in him by society and has a spiritual connection with the natural world. As turmoil is brewing, Simon goes into the jungle to take refuge in nature, and he is the only one who sees the “beast” for what it is: “‘Maybe,’ he said hesitantly, “maybe there is a beast…What I mean is. . . maybe it’s only us’. Of course, the id and superego are on opposite ends of the spectrum, one in line with the demands of an immature child and an instinctual animal, while the other lives on a different plane of existence. Naturally, they clash when they come head to head, and it is the ego’s job to mediate between them. When the boys kill Simon near the end of the novel, they also kill their conscience, the rules and implications set upon them in order to keep society civilized, and from this point until the boys get rescued their savage nature completely takes over and nothing holds them back any longer.

When a child’s innocence deteriorates to their primal instincts of survival, then fighting and questionable morality are not impossibilities. William Golding portrays this principle to show the innate “dark and evil” spirit of humanity, yet it can also exemplify how easily swayed by external influences the human mind is. The boys manifest the savagery of human disposition through mob mentality and tyrannical leadership, portraying the naive, capricious identity of mankind. People are more prone to forfeit their morals, their rationality to some degree or other, when it comes to donning the mob mentality. In Lord of the Flies, all of the boys displayed this behavior in their reenactment of the hunt. It starts off all fun and games, feeding off the hunting group’s excitable energy, until their behavior starts to become unmanageable. Robert, the theatrical imitation of the pig that was hunted, becomes an actual victim of the group’s bloodthirsty predation as the boys “got his arms and legs. Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric’s spear and jabbed at Robert with it … All at once, Robert was screaming and struggling with the strength of frenzy”. Even Ralph and Piggy turn towards violence, heavily fueled by the group’s post-adrenaline fever. In this case, the boys who were stimulated by the violence in their hunting exerted a sort of hypnotic influence on the rest of their members–and just like that, everyone was convinced to act on the prospect of violence beyond just “fun and games.” This phenomenon could be explained by an interesting social psychological theory known as Contagion Theory, which states that “Crowds exert a hypnotic influence on their members that results in irrational and emotionally charged behavior often referred to as crowd frenzy” (James 4). And so Ralph, typically referred to as the character who represents the balance between the id and ego, falls victim to the effects of mob mentality and does evil in the form of violent acts. Another mob mentality factor that causes the behavioral change of an individual is the dissipation of responsibility. Tamara Avant, a director of Psychology at South University, concurs that, “When people are part of a group, they often experience deindividuation, or a loss of self-awareness.

When people deindividuate, they are less likely to follow normal restraints and inhibitions and more likely to lose their sense of individual identity”. Deindividuation and a diffusion of responsibility mean that the conscience, or superego, gets overridden, and that the individual’s sense of personal connection with a misdeed is diminished. This shows how someone’s manner of conducting themselves is altered by the lack of responsibility that would normally be their immediate desires. William Golding demonstrates this loss of responsibility in mob mentality when the boys kill Simon on the stormy night when Ralph and Piggy visit Jack’s tribe, and as the storm brewed, the two groups merged together to chant and dance under this hypnotic influence. At the same time, Simon discovers the beast that they fear so greatly is a mere misperception. When Simon goes to tell the group that the beast is only a dead man with a parachute, they mistake him as the beast and murder him. Such crime usually holds great consequence, but due to the disintegration of responsibility caused by the mob mentality, none of the partakers feel any true guilt or individual responsibility for the death of Simon. Even Piggy and Ralph, characters who have still resisted Jack’s savage clan, push that responsibility away in the form of denial. Piggy states, “That’s right. We was on the outside. We never done nothing. We never seen nothing” (Golding 158). They cannot accept that they, too, have been involved in this horror, in the light of day, when reason returns. Not only are the three states of mind represented on the island, but so are the darker aspects of human tendencies, driven by group behavior. With mob mentality, the id takes over and destructive instinct precedes rationality.

The issue of superiority and inferiority is extremely prevalent in The Lord of the Flies. Ralph and Jack, at the head of this conflict of superiority, display behavior easily explained by Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology, which dictates that their drastic decline in composure is rooted in a feeling of inferiority, and they are merely boys focused on maintaining control over their situation, their pride, and their lives. When the boys realize their situation and are trying to implement any of the adult solutions from civilization they can think of, they immediately come to the question of who should be “chief”. “‘I ought to be chief,’ said Jack with simple arrogance, ‘because I’m chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp.’” Jack’s attitude is one of automatic superiority because he has status compared to others, and because of an ability that doesn’t equate to leadership at all. The hallmark of the inferiority/superiority mentality is comparison. Every bully needs someone to bully, or else they are not effective. Often, when a person feels threatened, he will try to compensate by proving strength, as Jack tries to do when he says, “I was just waiting for a moment to decide where to stab him.’…’Why didn’t you—?” They knew very well why he hadn’t…Next time—! He snatched his knife…and slammed it into a tree trunk. Next time there would be no mercy. He looked round fiercely, daring them to contradict”.

Jack is clearly ashamed of his momentary weakness and so needs to emphasize his savagery, and therefore strength, compensating for a feeling of inferiority with an outward show of force–of fictive superiority. As Adler notes, “There is no nervous patient who does not attempt to veil through his symptoms the fact that he is worried over his fictive superiority…Behind the illness is the pathological ambitious striving of the patient to regard himself as something extraordinary’. Jack’s ego is fragile and he can’t deal with any contradiction, which he sees as a threat. This is also evident because his pride is still smarting at being bested by Ralph in the vote for chief. Since Ralph gathers everyone by blowing a conch, Ralph is elected as the leader. The conch symbolizes civilization and order governing the boys and restraining their behavior where it’s needed. Ralph does not need an official status to subdue inner feelings of inferiority, like Jack – he does not have an inferiority complex that makes him try to oppress or impress others. Jack exemplifies Adler’s insight that “To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. … The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” In contrast to the civilized approach of the conch, Jack’s entire being expresses violence, tyranny and primal instincts that become highly infectious and influences the minds of the younger.

Jack desertion of the original group leads many of the boys to follow him and become part of his demented tribe, and in the process, Jack gains the superiority he wanted all along. Any sense of civility or rationality is discarded, and Piggy, who represents reasoning throughout the story, is killed after the conch is destroyed. One of Jack’s followers, Robert “struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist”. And with the destruction of the conch, the civilized order Ralph and Piggy had so desperately tried to maintain was no more. Golding’s choice of diction being “ceased to exist” cements a sort of finality to the broken conch, and of the defeat of both civilization and Ralph’s superiority. Wherever there is a sense of internal inferiority, an external superiority becomes crucial to one’s pride.

Golding, in creating this world and these characters, creates a unique experiment that tests the innocuous nature of little children in an environment with no law, no restraints, and no grown civilization to tell them that they couldn’t. What he proves is that children throw away the values they once had ingrained into their heads for the fulfillment of their basic needs, no better than savage beasts in the wild, when the psychological toll of a self-led greed and evil consumes schoolboys that don’t know better. The Lord of the Flies demonstrates the psychological consequences of trapping young impressionable boys on an island, a result that shows how the primal instincts of even the youngest of people can collapse a society.

Posted in Boy

Essay on Sports Development Initiatives for Girls and Boys

Big World Impact is an international charity that aims to create safe sustainable futures for the youth of the world. Their mission is to educate, empower and sustain. They also aim to keep the youth out of trouble and instead get them interested and involved in different sports and areas within sports. An example of their work would be the progress that they have made in Leigh Park since 2014. After just 3 months of delivering activities at Leigh Park, over 250 different young people aged between 9 and 19 were accessing the sessions weekly and the numbers kept on rising.

One of the main barriers that Big World Impact overcomes is the barrier of time. Many young people are not able to participate in sport because they do not have enough free time to participate in the session. This initiative overcomes this barrier by providing many sessions available at many different times, especially during the school holidays. This allows lots of opportunities for many young people to participate and because the sessions are free the young people can turn up to any session, they want.

Another chief barrier that Big World Impact overcomes is the barrier of the gender divide. Big world impact offers sporting activities that are appealing to both boys and girls aged between 9 and 19. Furthermore, they also offer sports leadership courses. This allows participants in the sessions to become more confident as a leader in sports and could lead to young people wanting to take up a serious career in sport.

Another important barrier that Big World Impact overcomes is the barrier of cost, due to the fact, the sessions that they provide are free to the local youth and also offer other opportunities to the local youth, such as awareness workshops. By providing these sessions for free, it means that anyone that would like to participate in the clubs can do so without worrying about the costs involved in participating in other sports.

An example of a club that has benefited from this scheme is Havant and Waterlooville Football Club. They benefited because they were able to get some publicity for helping out by providing professional equipment and coaching for the people who came to participate in football. Furthermore, it could have been the use for the football club to use this opportunity as a pool to find young talent to add to their youth squads, which can also be seen as a benefit.

This Girl Can is a national sporting development initiative that was developed by Sports England. This initiative was designed to help the recognition and promotion of women in sport. This is one of the most well-known and has encouraged a vast number of women to get more active. They provide a large variety of sports. This means that no matter what you are into, there will always be something that you can get involved in, meaning that it is very inclusive. 41% of women aged 14-40 who recognize the campaign say they have done some or more activity as a result equivalent to 2.8 million women across England (Source: TNS BRMB for Sports England). An example of a center that has made use of the scheme is the Leicester Shire and Rutland Sport. They have organized events such as Charity Nights Out. At these Nights Out you can participate in activities such as netball, jungle body Konga and burlesque.

One of the main benefits of the This Girl Can initiative is that it offers a vast variety of locations in which the activities take place. This is very beneficial because women will not need to worry about where they live or their transport situation, which is a huge barrier for a lot of women across the UK.

Another thing is that beneficial about this initiative is that it overcomes the barrier to participation for women, which is one of the main reasons that This Girl Can be introduced. This is good because it has been suggested in the past by many people, that women do not have enough sporting opportunities to participate in.

Another benefit of This Girl Can is that it is very well promoted. This Girl Can has aired adverts on TV and social media which has inspired thousands of women to search for the initiative up on the internet and possibly consider getting involved after reading more about what they do.

Compare and contrast of Big World Impact and This Girl Can

The first comparison that can be made is that both of the initiatives attempt to promote sports and activity towards two target groups that are considered to lack the opportunity to participate, less well-off children and women. This is very beneficial because it gives an opportunity to participate and enjoy the wide variety of sports that is provided by both initiatives, to those people who previously did not have a chance to participate for different reasons. Furthermore, by aiming their initiatives at less well of children and women, both are more easily recognizable because of the fact that they are both unique, and the more they get recognized the better the situation will be for the initiative, and the people involved in it, as there could an increase in funding, for example, which would allow the initiatives to grow bigger and better.

A contrast that can be made between the two initiatives is that Big World Impact offers sports sessions and more to its participants and audience. For example, it offers the opportunity for many to develop leadership skills that will be able to help them in their sporting endeavors or for other future plans that they may have. Things such as the leadership sessions are a good option for the This Girl Can to incorporate into their own initiative, rather than just learning fitness tips and new sports. This would increase their participation levels for them and will help people with life skills.

Another comparison that can be made between the two initiatives is that they both have lots and lots of sessions active at different times throughout the week. This means that there will be sessions that is on at a time that suits almost any potential participant who is considering taking part. Having lots of sessions on throughout the week is very important for almost all sports initiatives because it allows their initiative to become more well-known and will interest more people, allowing both of the initiatives to become bigger and better.

Another contrast that can be made between the two initiatives is that This Girl Can is a lot bigger than Big World Impact. The difference between the two, in terms of coverage, is huge and partly the reason why This Girl Can is a lot more recognized than Big World Impact. This Girl Can has a lot more funding as it is a national sports initiative developed by Sports England, in contrast, Big World Impact is a charity so doesn`t have as much funding as This Girl Can. In order to get more funding, Big World Impact can get more partnerships which will raise its profile and attract more partnerships.

Another comparison that can be made between the two initiatives is that they both aim for getting more people involved in sports. This is so that the initiatives can encourage more people to choose a healthier and more active lifestyle which will, not only help them in the long term but can also make the participants feel better about themselves in the short term. One method that both This Girl Can and Big World Impact use in order to achieve their aim of getting more people involved in sports, is by offering sports that are not considered mainstream (e.g., archery and sailing). This method can help drive up participation levels and, therefore, allow both of the initiatives to grow bigger and better and more well-known.

Another contrast that can be made between the two initiatives is that This Girl Can has a lot more advertisements to raise the profile of their won initiative. By investing in advertising, there is a likely possibility that there will be an increase in participation levels. In contrast, Big World Impact is a charity and simply does not have the funding to advertise like This Girl Can, at present. This means that their participation rates will not grow as quickly as This Girl Can, as they can only advertise locally, but they have the potential to grow bigger and increase the number of partnerships that they have.

Suggestions for improvement

An improvement that could be suggested to improve the This Girl Can initiative is for them to try and reach more into secondary schools, colleges and universities. This would be a good target area for the initiative to focus on as it is primarily around these ages that a woman is most conscious about their body and if they are unhappy then this is the perfect time to switch up their lifestyle. This could be especially true for someone who is very unhealthy because it means they will have a chance to change their ways before they do damage to their body. This would be a good consideration for the initiative to make because, as it is a free service, it means that This Girl Can will be especially appealing to girls who are in the age group that do not have the funds to, for example, join gyms, because they are full-time education and not able to work.

Another improvement that could be suggested to improve the This Girl Can initiative is for them to offer the participants that take part in the scheme, not only the chance to take part and get fit, but also to take up more of a leadership role. In order to achieve this, This Girl Can organize some leadership and coaching qualifications that they could run to give an opportunity to those who want to get into a sports profession. By doing this, This Girl Can will be able to build up a reputation for developing sports leaders as well as assisting women trying to get fit.

An improvement that could be suggested to improve the Big World Impact initiative is to expand and increase the area that they are working in because, at present, they are heavily concentrated in offering sports sessions in Leigh Park. This is a good place to offer their sessions because around the area, the vast majority of the children around Leigh Park are not as well off as others, but the initiative should try and provide these sporting opportunities to other children in different areas similar to the areas around Leigh Park. By doing this, Big World Impact could be able to make themselves more well-known and give themselves the opportunity to make more partnerships which would increase the funding, awareness of eh charity, and, most importantly, participation.

Another improvement that could be suggested to improve the Big World Impact initiative is for them to get more involved with schools as their target age is 9-18. This would be a logical decision to make because it helps them try and raise awareness that they are offering free sports sessions for kids and will have a high chance of increasing participation. A benefit of this is that, as the sessions are free, it is likely to tempt the kids to participate as most, if not all, are not likely to be earning money and the initiative may be offering something that they have not tried and would like to try out or if they are offering something that the kid especially loves participating in.

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