LOTF Chapter 1-6 Key quotes + Analysis Flashcards
For a moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy on the outside…
Highlights Piggy’s isolation and status as an outsider who lacks the respect of the others
About choir boys: Something dark was fumbling along… the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing.
The choir boys were dressed in black and appeared dark. They later became the hunters. This symbolises darkness and evil within the hunters.
About jack: They knew very well why he hadn’t [killed the piglet]: because of the enormity of the knife descending and
cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood.
Jack has not yet transformed into a ruthless killer and savage. His next attempt to kill shows his transition from the first failed attempt.
About Piggy: “with the martyred expression of a parent”
Presents piggy as a mature and rational parent. The use of “Martyred” foreshadows the death of piggy, and how he sacrifices himself for the greater good.
Jack says: I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.
Irony which portrays the facade of civility cloaking Jack and the boys.
Jack says: We’ll have rules… then when anyone breaks ‘em - / Bollocks to the rules
Ironic as Jack was keen on rules yet was the main culprit of wrecking them
On Jack and Ralph: They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate.
Suggests the hatred existing between Jack and Ralph and their status as pillars of opposing ideologies.
About Jack: became less a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the tangle of trees
Captures the essence of Jack’s transformation into an animalistic, tribalistic savage.
About Jack: He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up.
Portray’s Jack submitting to his primal urges - his savage nature is gradually corrupting his mind,
Jack says: If you’re hunting sometimes… you can feel as if you’re not hunting, but – being hunted, as if something’s behind you all the time in the jungle.
Suggests the liberating and transcendent experience that hunting provides to Jack - an experience which catalyses his descent into savagery.
About Roger: Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.
Roger’s attachment to his former life of order and his association of actions to consequences is the only thing which stops him from becoming a savage who solely follows his instinctive desires.
On Jack’s ‘mask’: …the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.
Highlights the staggering influence of the painted faces as catalysts which allowed Jack and his hunters to lose their former civility without any sense of personal shame due to losing their connections to their former identities.
Ralph’s thoughts: If faces where different when lit from above or below – what was a face? What was anything?
Their faces are a symbol of their humanity and identity, Ralph questions “What was a face?” which shows the liberation that the boys experience by hiding their faces.
Ralph says: Things are breaking up. I don’t understand why. We began well; we were happy. And then – …then people started getting frightened.
Portrays the inexplicable fear that plagued the boys and caused their descent into savagery.
Piggy says: I know there isn’t no beast – not with claws and all that, I mean – but I know there isn’t no fear either … Unless –… Unless we get frightened of people.
Piggy theorises the beast’s true nature as the paranoia that lingers in the minds rather than a literal monster.
