Literary Elements of Golding's Lord of the Flies
Literary Elements of Golding's Lord of the Flies
Most good writers like to include some scene or sentence that just catches peoples eye. And they wonder, why did they have to put that in? or was it even necessary to have that happen. The book Lord of the Flies by William Golding has many scenes that are meant to have the reader wondering but one scene that caught my eye was the fallowing:
In Chapter 8 “Gift for the Darkness” after the hunters hunted down a pig and had killed it. Jack the leader of the hunting group orders for a stick to be sharpened at two ends and then sticks the head of the pig on the stick and jams it in the ground. Then he says “This head is for the beast. It’s a gift.”(137).
This scene always has me wondering why did they need to put the pigs head on a stick? Do they really think that there is a beast? And does jack believe that this beast is some kind of god and needs a sacrifice?
I could come up with a few different reasons why Golding might have wanted the boys to do this to a pigs head. Maybe the boys were trying to scare the beast, sort of saying don’t mess with us, look what we can do. I think the boys know that there probably is no beast and are just doing this as a form of entertainment. And maybe after being on this island so long jacks mind was warped and he had some how came to believe that this beast is the god of the island.
But most likely this scene alone makes up for the title of the chapter “Gift for the Darkness” and the title of the book Lord of the Flies because the head is lord of the flies and Jack and the hunters are giving a gift for the darkness, the god that they might believe in now.
If I were to title this scene, I would call it “sacrifice for a god” because it seems that the boys believe in this beast as some god and they need to sacrifice something for it.
The scene here relates to a theme from the book: Fear causes chaos. The boys were so afraid of the beast before and now because of this fear they go and mutilate a poor...