LOTF Themes Flashcards
there are some overlaps with character quotes
Savagery
(dehumanising)
‘Imitation war cry that was answered by a dozen voices’
Savagery
(savage need for blood)
“Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.”
Savagery
(loss of innocence)
‘His laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling’
Loss of civilisation
(Piggy)
“There was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch”
Loss of civilisation
(rejecting bounds of society)
‘Bollocks to the rules’
Loss of civilisation
(mourning corruption of innocence with the inherent evil of man)
“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy’
innocence
(stark contrast to violent chase scene)
“A semi-circle of little boys, their bodies streaked with coloured clay”
Innocence
(unable to comprehend brutality)
‘You aren’t playing the game’
(Ralph to Jack)
Fear
(loosing control and safety)
‘you can feel as if you’re not hunting, but being hunted’
Fear
(fear of turning against one another)
‘I know there isn’t no fear, either … Unless we get frightened of people’
Fear
(overcoming fear with violence)
‘If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down.’
Leadership
(the children need the stability of authority)
‘A link with the adult world of authority’
Leadership
(too much leadership leading to tyranny)
‘This weapon, so indefinable and so effective’
(Ralph’s status as chief)
Power
(corrupting nature of authority)
‘Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms, authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape’
Power
(power of democracy)
‘They obey the summons of the conch’
Nationalism
(blindness of british nationalism)
‘After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.’
Violence
(militaristic language)
“machine-gunned piggy”
Violence
(overcome by a primal urge for violence)
‘He tried to convey the notion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up’
Democracy
(importance of democracy in civilisation)
‘We’ve got to have rules and obey them.’
Civilisation
(questioning societal conditioning)
‘Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilisation that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.’
Crowd mentality
(dehumanising and violence through crowd mentality)
‘There was the throb and stamp of a single organism’
Crowd mentality
(danger of mob mentality - liberating internal violent savagery)
‘the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.”
Evil
(Simon sees the internal evil which is the real beast)
‘Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
Evil
(danger of excessive power)
“they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink”
Evil
(duality of man)
‘The picture of a human at once heroic and sick’ (simon’s perception of the LOTF)
Friendship
(childish)
‘Jack and Ralph smiled at each other with shy liking’
Colonialism
‘savoured the right of domination’
Savagery vs civilisation
(Jack vs Ralph)
“There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled commonsense.”
