‘Lord of the flies’ – take it out of the classroom

The arrival of Y2K brought none of the social, environmental, or technological catastrophes predicted by the tabloids, but neither did the in the altogether millennium bring relief from the persistent impediments to free verbiage that characterized the twentieth century. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reminds us that without most of human history, authority, fortified by the highest religious and philosophic texts, has righteously invoked censorship to stifle expression.He cites the Old Testament proscription Tell it non in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. Schlesinger also offers the command of Plato The poet sh completely compose nothing contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or just, or beautiful, or good, which atomic number 18 allowed in the state nor shall he be permitted to show his compositions to any private several(prenominal) until he shall have sh possess them to t he appointed censors and the guardians of the law, and they ar satisfied with them.Introduction manufacturer of the Flies has been the center of controversy over the years having been resurrected from its status as a cult classic. However, in my opinion this novel represents a lot of possible socially wrong viewpoints and could be the cause for seeding violent, vulgar and anti-social thoughts in school children. It is because of this originator that I propose to restrict it from classrooms in the school system. The issue of banned take fors has been escalating since Guttenberg introduced the printing press in 1455.Once speech could be printed, it became a commodity, to be controlled and manipulated on the basis of religion, politics, or profit. After Pope Leo X condemned Martin Luthers Ninety Five Theses in 1517, both Catholics and Protestants began censoring materials that they found parlous or subversive. Religious censorship quickly led to political censorship when Luther def ied the Pope, bringing an immediate response from Emperor Charles V. On May 26, 1521, the emperor issued the legislation of Worms, containing a Law of Printing, which prohibited the printing, sale, possession, reading, or copying of Luthers works.However, in the United States and England, a social consensus on censorship was emerging that would be furthermost more repressive than overt state or church power. By the 1830s, this new ideology was proclaiming the necessity for propriety, prudence, and sexual restraint.During the remainder of the nineteenth century, private uprightness became public virtue, and Ameri potful and British editors, publishers, writers, and librarians felt obliged to examine every al-Quran for crude language or unduly explicit or pictorial portraitures of life. In her introduction to the 1984 New York Public Library exhibition on censorship, Ann Ilan Alter said that there may have been more censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, during the nineteenth cen tury in England and the United States than during all the preceding centuries of printed literature.The twentieth century in America has seen the emergence of pressure groups that maintain an uneasy sense of equilibrium in the struggle to interpret our First Am terminatement rights. The federal government tips that balance in whatever direction the winds blow, and since 1980, those winds have been chilling. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dividing lines The struggle between expression and authority is unending. The instinct to suppress discomforting ideas is rooted deep in human spirit. It is rooted above all in profound human propensities to faith and fear. victor of the Flies In the Spotlight victor of the Flies focused attention on the concept of cult literature as a campus phenomenon. Time cartridge holder called it Lord of the Campus and identified it as one in a series of underground literary favorites that were challenging the required reading lists of the traditional humanities curriculum.Up until William Goldings surprise bestseller, it had been common knowledge that students were reading unauthorized books, especially J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye, in spite of (and frequently because of) their condemnation by the establishment. But the human beings of a serious sub-literature with an intelligent, dedicated readership flourishing in the midst of the conventional curriculum was something unprecedented on college campuses.During the twenties and thirties, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe had quickly been welcomed into the ranks of mainstream, respectable writers and labeled literature. While a few critics might choose to ignore these newcomers, there was nothing particularly subversive about what they wrote. Following the success of The Catcher in the Rye, however, no literary observer could be quite sure that the tastes of young readers could be trusted. After all, there were certain attitudes in Salinger that threatened the established order, and when Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, there was apprehension afoot that young readers might find Jack more interesting than Ralph-as indeed many of them did.AnalysisWhat nervous detractors overlooked was the open-and-shut lesson in this Golding classic that traits like naked aggression and gratuitous cruelty, selfishness, idolatry, superstition, and a taste for violence are not restricted to any particular nationality or race but are inherent in human disposition and inhabit the mentality of every human being. If there was anything subversive about this idea, it was that no longer could evil be considered peculiar to the Japanese or the German character. In fact, those who had recently fought against them had waged war with equal relish.When Golding saw the ecstasy on the faces of his workfellow sailors in the North Atlantic as they returned the fire of the enemy or launched an attack he felt the shock of recognition that the beast was with in us all, just waiting to break through that fragile veneer we call civilization. What he clearly intended as a reminder to his readers (after all, mans aggressive nature was not a new philosophical position by any means) became for cult readers another weapon to use against those who argued that atrocities such as those committed by the Germans and the Japanese could never be committed by the Allies who had struggled against them.We were good people who treated others with kindness and generosity and fought those who attacked us with the greatest reluctance and the achievement disdain. Even to suggest that we might enjoy the slaughter was to malign the honor and integrity of the Allied forces.Regardless of how his theme was interpreted, however, Goldings thesis had firm mythological precedents. in that location are many myths underlying Lord of the Flies, but the basic description of reality is of a world inhabited by men of an evil nature restrained only by voluntary adherence to a pragmatic pact of nonaggression. Such a pact passes for civilization, but because it is maintained only through fear, it is constantly threatened by that fear. The defensive fear that keeps one man from his neighbors throat can also incite him to cut that throat before his own gets cut.Lord of the Flies is a case study in alienation. Gradually, with horrifying inevitability, against a backdrop of paradise, the numbers of those who remember their humanity and still cling to the move of civilization are reduced until there is but one solitary figure left, and just before the ironic rescue, we see himbecome himas he flees his savage pursuers, the backdrop itself reflecting the degradation of those pursuers as the island of paradise burns and smokes and is reduced to char and ashes.StorylineFirst we see the whole group splitting and fetching sides, but the balance, at least for a while, remains on the side of Ralph. Then slowly but irresistibly, Ralphs supporters are drawn toward the charismatic Jack and his choir, until at long last there are only four holding out against them the twins, Piggy, and Ralph himself. Then the twins are captured and Piggy is killed. Ralph is alone, civilized man alone against the powers of darkness. But we are left with the awful suspicion that he remains civilized only because Jack must have an enemy and Ralph must be that enemy.Excluded forever from Jacks group, Ralph encourages amplify sympathy because he is so terribly alone. A victim always seems somehow more civilized than his tormentors. Nevertheless, much of the power of this book derives from the fact that our sympathies can only be with Ralph and that we, therefore, can feel the vulnerability, the awful weakness, of flimsy rationality at the mercy of a world gone mad. There is no endue to run, no place to hide, no exit. And rescue is only temporary and perhaps ultimately more horrible than quick and early death.Media treatment of issues about children relies heavy on such simplistic generalizations with children represented as objects of concern or as threats to adult order. The former relies on an idealized view of children as pure, clean-handed and vulnerable, strikeing protection or salvation from dangers they can neither identify nor comprehend. The latter, of children drawn innately (unless prevented) towards evil and anarchy, also has deep historical roots (Miller, 1983). It is a portrayal powerfully evoked by William Goldings (1959) novel, Lord of the Flies.The power of this fictional work is evident in the frequency with which it is given respect and credibility in press accounts of deviant children. It evokes an apocalyptic vision of anarchy as being inevitable should children lose the discipline and order of the adult presence. The portrayals of children as innocent victims or culpable delinquents are no more than alternative placements that the adult world creates into which children are located at different times, in different circumstances.The idea that children are products of nature or nurture leads to media concern as to whether child deviance is rooted in a biological predisposition or in an environmental determinism. Childrens meanings and motivations are persistently ignored, as is the position of adults, both familial and professional, as powerful definers of deviant behavior. Consequently, much of the physical and psychological harm inflicted on children by adults is disregarded, while transgressions by children of their set role are the subject of furious condemnation.Original sin is what Golding was writing about a religious concept, we mistrust more relevant to the mayhem that occurred at this C of E school in Liverpool than any glib sociological generalization. Children will run wild, viciously wild, unless they are properly supervised. They need parents to give them a stable and ordered home.They need teachers who know how to keep order as well as how to impart knowledge. They need, perfec tion help them, practical instruction in the difference between right and wrong. Here was a rhetoric established and developed which was to re-emerge throughout the beside decade, particularly following the murder of James Bulger. It invoked Goldings construct of anarchy inherent in children left to themselves.Thesis Fallacies and ImmoralitiesGolding seems in many ways to modify Lord of the Flies in order to make his point as clearly as possible. For example, all learnings in the book are entirely predictable, suggesting not only that the course taken by Goldings boys is inevitable, but that violence and brutality are inevitable in all interactions among human beings. Moreover, though Goldings carefully constructed book includes a fairly complex network of literary symbols and devices, all of them tend directly to support the central message. For example, the observable deus ex machina ending of the book is cold shoulder by the facts that the British are still at war and the a dults who arrive to restore order are themselves engaged in a mission of final stage the motivation of which is not fundamentally different from that of the savage hunting frenzies of Jack and his tribe of boys.This parallel presumably suggests that the supposedly civilized adults are really as savage as the primitivized boys, though it could also be taken as a suggestion that the training received by Jack and his choir in military school had already been sufficient to inculcate them with the kind of militaristic values that have led civilization to a cataclysmic war. Indeed, despite the apparent clarity of its message, Goldings fable is flawed on several accounts.For one thing, this island confederacy could never really represent a new start for humanity because it is all male and therefore incapable of perpetuating itself. For another, the boys on the island are not really innocent they have already been thoroughly socialized by the same society that seems to be destroying itsel f through warfare.Still, in some ways Lord of the Flies is an exemplary dystopian fiction. In it Golding creates a fictional society distant from the real world, then utilizes the defamiliarizing perspective of that distance to comment upon the shortcomings of our own social reality. However, whereas most dystopian fictions are designed to function as cautionary tales that warn against the development of specific social and political problems, Golding suggests that all human societies are inevitably doomed by the darkness at the heart of humanity itself.Goldings book frankincense lacks the drive toward positive social and political change that informs the best dystopian fictions. If there is a cautionary element in the book, it would seem to involve a hope that were humans aware of their natural tendencies toward violence they might stand a better chance of keeping those tendencies in check. In this respect, it is important to note that Lord of the Flies really makes two major point s. First, and more obvious, is the suggestion that human nature lies at the root of most of the ills that plague society. But the book also suggests that society itself is based on an attempt to deny this fact, thus making matters even worse.Although many critics have complained about the gimmick at the end of the novel the boys are saved the officer doesnt understand the violence which has occurred it is justified because it is another appearance. The officer allows his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance, but we doubt that he can see it or the water with full knowledge. Lord of the Flies is therefore a novel of faulty vision. stinkpot the boys ever see the elements? Are the elements really there? Is a marriage between elements and consciousness possible?The novel is not about Evil, Innocence, or free Will it goes beyond (or under) these abstractions by questioning the very ability to formulate them. Look at any crucial scene. There is an abundance of descriptive flesh out the elements are exaggerated because they are all that the boys possess but these details are blurred in one way or another. The result is, paradoxically, a confusing clarity. (Even the solid words the boys use are illusive Piggy says ass-mar for asthma Sam and Eric call themselves one name, Sam n Eric.) Here is the basic vision of the dead man in the treeIn front of them, only three or four yards away, was a persuade-like hump where no rock should be. Ralph could hear a tiny chattering noise coming from somewhereperhaps from his own mouth. He bound himself together with his will, fused his fear and abhor into a hatred, and stood up. He took two leaden steps forward. Behind them the sliver of moon had drawn clear of the horizon. Before them, something like a great aper was sitting asleep with its head between its knees. Then the wind roared in the forest, there was confusion in the darkness and the creature lifted its head, holding towards them the interrupt of a fa ce.ConclusionGolding gives us the short distance, the hulking object. Ralph (and the others) should be able to see. But he cannot. Although he binds himself becoming more stable he does not know where the noise comes from or what the no-rock is. His senses cannot rule the elements. He, like the lifted face, is a ruin. V. S. Pritchett claims that Lord of the Flies indicates Goldings desire to catch the sensation of things coming into us.On the contrary, it indicates his need to tell us that out there and in here never marry not even on an enchanted island. We should not forget that the Lord of the Flies may be only a skull an object given miraculous life because of faulty vision. It is precisely because of this misguided literary piece and its chance to lead school children astray with its vague philosophies.Works CitedCarey John, ed. William Golding the Man and His Books. New York Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.Devkota Padma Prasad. The Darkness Motif in the Primitive Novels of William Golding. DAI 51 ( 1990) 860A. Monteith Charles. Strangers from Within into Lord of the Flies. ( London) Times literary Supplement ( September 19, 1986) 1030. Tanzman Leo. The Murder of Simon in Goldings Lord of the Flies. Notes on Contemporary Literature ( Nov. 1987) 2-3. Watson George. The Coronation of Realism. The Georgia Review (Spring 1987) 5-16. Golding William. Lord of the Flies. New York Coward-McCann, 1962.