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

The arrival of Y2K brought n ane of the favorable, environmental, or technological catastrophes predicted by the tabloids, but uncomplete did the new millennium bring relief from the persistent impediments to free observation that characterized the twentieth light speed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reminds us that throughout most of forgiving history, authority, fortified by the highest religious and philosophical texts, has righteously invoked censoring to stifle expression.He cites the one-time(a) Testament proscription Tell it non in Gath, publish it non in the streets of Askelon lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. Schlesinger also offers the injunction of Plato The poet sh every last(predicate) compose nix contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or right, or beautiful, or good, which atomic number 18 every(prenominal)owed in the put in nor shall he be permitted to show his compositions to every private individu al until he shall get under ones skin sh birth them to the decreed censors and the guardians of the law, and they atomic number 18 satisfied with them.Introduction shaper of the wing has been the center of strife over the years having been resurrected from its status as a cult classic. However, in my opinion this refreshful represents a lot of possible socially misuse messpoints and could be the cause for catch up withding violent, vulgar and anti-social thoughts in condition children. It is because of this reason that I propose to restrict it from classrooms in the school system. The issue of banned legers has been escalating since Guttenberg introduced the print 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 put up dangerous or subversi ve. Religious censorship quickly led to policy-making censorship when Luther defied the Pope, bringing an immediate response from Emperor Charles V. On may 26, 1521, the emperor issued the Edict of Worms, containing a Law of Printing, which prohibited the printing, sale, possession, reading, or copy of Luthers works.However, in the United States and England, a social consensus on censorship was emerging that would be far more(prenominal) repressive than overt state or church power. By the 1830s, this new ideology was proclaiming the necessity for propriety, prudence, and versed restraint.During the remainder of the ordinal century, private virtue became public virtue, and Ameri tooshie and British editors, publishers, writers, and librarians felt obliged to examine every book for crude terminology or unduly explicit or realistic portrayals of life. In her foot to the 1984 New York Public Library exhibition on censorship, Ann Ilan Alter express that there may cast been more censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, during the nineteenth century 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 groupings that maintain an uneasy ratio in the struggle to interpret our First Amendment rights. The federal government tips that parallelism in whatever direction the winds blow, and since 1980, those winds have been chilling. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. notes The struggle in the midst of expression and authority is un cease. The instinct to suppress discomforting ideas is grow deep in compassionate reputation. It is rooted above all in profound valet de chambre propensities to faith and fear. original of the wing In the Spotlight lord of the Flies focused attention on the concept of cult literature as a campus phenomenon. Time magazine called it shaper of the Campus and identified it as one in a series of underground literary favorites that were challenging the demand reading lists of the traditional humanities curriculum.Up until William Goldings surprise bestseller, it had been common association that students were reading unauthorized books, especially J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye, in go against of (and frequently because of) their condemnation by the establishment. But the existence of a wicked sub-literature with an in telligent, dedicated readership flourishing in the midst of the conventional curriculum was something infrequent 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. epoch a few critics might choose to ignore these newcomers, there was nothing particularly subversive close to what they wrote. Following the success of The Catcher in the Rye, however, no literary observer could be quite sure that the tastes of junior read ers could be trusted. After all, there were certain attitudes in Salinger that imperil the realised order, and when Golding wrote entitle of the Flies, there was apprehension afoot that young readers might arrive Jack more interesting than Ralph-as indeed many of them did.AnalysisWhat skittish detractors overlooked was the obvious lesson in this Golding classic that traits corresponding naked antagonism and gratuitous cruelty, selfishness, idolatry, superstition, and a taste for violence are not circumscribe to any particular nationality or race but are inwrought in human personality 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 struggle with equal relish.When Golding saw the ecstasy on the faces of his fellow sailors in the trade union Atlantic as they returned the fire of the enemy or launched an attack he felt the shock of recognition that the beast was within 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 perpetrate by the Germans and the Japanese could never be committed by the affiliate who had struggled against them.We were good people who treated others with kindness and generosity and fought those who attacked us with the great reluctance and the utmost disdain. Even to suggest that we might enjoy the lashing 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. There are many myths underlying gentle of the Flies, but the basic description of realit y is of a world inhabit by men of an evil nature restrained single 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 travel of civilization are reduced until there is but one nonsocial 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 destroy and smokes and is reduced to char and ashes.StorylineFirst we see the whole group splitting and taking sides, but the balance, at least for a while , ashes on the side of Ralph. Then slowly but irresistibly, Ralphs supporters are worn-out toward the charismatic Jack and his choir, until finally there are only quadruple holding out against them the twins, Piggy, and Ralph himself. Then the twins are captured and Piggy is killed. Ralph is alone, down man alone against the powers of tail. But we are left with the awful misgiving that he remains civilized only because Jack must have an enemy and Ralph must be that enemy.Excluded forever from Jacks group, Ralph encourages overstate 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 view to run, no place to hide, no exit. And rescue is only temporary and mayhap ultimately mo re horrible than quick and early death.Media treatment of issues about children relies heavily on such simplistic generalizations with children represented as objects of connect or as threats to adult order. The former relies on an idealized view of children as pure, innocent and vulnerable, needing 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 historic 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 tending(p) respect and credibility in press accounts of deviant children. It evokes an prophetic vision of anarchy as being inevitable should children lose the specify and order of the adult presence. The portrayals of children as innocent victims or culpable delinquents are no more than alternative placements that t he adult world creates into which children are find at opposite 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 victimize 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 suspect more relevant to the mayhem that occurred at this C of E school in Liverpool than any glib sociological generalization. Children ordain run wild, viciously wild, unless they are properly supervised. They need parents to give them a stable and ordered home.They ne ed teachers who know how to keep order as well as how to impart knowledge. They need, God help them, practical focussing in the difference amongst right and wrong. Here was a ornateness established and developed which was to re-emerge throughout the next decade, particularly side by side(p) 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 simplify Lord of the Flies in order to make his point as clearly as possible. For example, all developments in the book are entirely predictable, suggesting not only that the course taken by Goldings boys is inevitable, but that violence and ferociousness are inevitable in all interactions among human beings. Moreover, though Goldings guardedly 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 apparent deus ex mac hina ending of the book is undercut by the facts that the British are still at war and the adults who arrive to restore order are themselves engaged in a mission of destruction 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 purportedly civilized adults are genuinely as savage as the primitivized boys, though it could also be taken as a suggestion that the formulation 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 pellucidity of its message, Goldings fable is flawed on several accounts.For one thing, this island corporation could never in reality 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 rea lly innocent they have already been thoroughly socialized by the aforesaid(prenominal) society that seems to be destroying itself 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 short approachings of our own social reality. However, whereas most dystopian fictions are designed to function as preventive 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 consequently 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 get o ut chance of keeping those tendencies in check. In this respect, it is important to note that Lord of the Flies really makes two major points. 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 &8212 the boys are saved the officer doesnt understand the violence which has occurred &8212 it is justified because it is another appearance. The officer allows his eyes to rest on the turn off 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. Can 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 beyon d (or under) these abstractions by questioning the very ability to formulate them. Look at any crucial scene. There is an abundance of descriptive details &8212 the elements are exaggerated because they are all that the boys possess &8212 but these details are film over in one way or another. The result is, paradoxically, a misidentify clarity. (Even the solid words the boys use are illusive Piggy says ass-mar for bronchial asthma Sam and Eric call themselves one name, Sam n Eric.) Here is the first off vision of the dead man in the treeIn reckon of them, only three or four yards away, was a rock-like hump where no rock should be. Ralph could hear a tiny chattering folie coming from somewhereperhaps from his own mouth. He bound himself together with his will, amalgamated his fear and loathing into a hatred, and stood up. He took two leaden move forward. Behind them the sliver of moon had drawn clear of the horizon. Before them, something like a great ape was sitting asleep w ith 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 ruin of a face.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 &8212 becoming more stable &8212 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 wed &8212 not even on an enchanted island. We should not forget that the Lord of the Flies may be only a skull &8212 an object given miraculous life because of faulty vision. It is precisely because of this misguided literary tack and its possibility to lead school children astray wit h its vague philosophies.Works CitedCarey John, ed. William Golding the homosexual 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 indoors 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 polish up (Spring 1987) 5-16. Golding William. Lord of the Flies. New York Coward-McCann, 1962.