Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read this and had it on my list to read again. I've seen things that I missed before. For example, I realized that Piggy was the smartest one on the island and that his support and help allowed the more charismatic Ralph to be the leader he was. Piggy was able to see what was happening and he was the only one who had any real insight into the things necessary for their rescue. I think I just saw him as a natural target of cruelty and bullying the other times I read it and didn't realize his gifts.

Ralph was a natural leader because he had absorbed his earlier moral training and he understood the wisdom of it, but during the dance of the savages, he was pulled into behavior that he couldn't understand or condone.

I saw the struggle between Ralph and Jack as a struggle between civilization and savagery, but I didn't see Simon as the only truly moral child. He was one of the rare individuals, like Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King, whose sense of justice was not just the product of the civilizing effects of society and culture, but a deep sense of natural empathy and morality.


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