I just started reading “Frankenstein.” Yes, the Mary Shelley book.
Wow, I’m sure glad this wasn’t foisted on me as a teenager. It’s chock-full of big words.
When I was in 6th grade circa 1970, I read a book from the school library that was an imitation of Lord of the Flies. Similar setup, similar plot development, similar action, practically a cloned novel. At the time I hadn’t read Lord of the Flies yet, but just from descriptions I’d overheard I recognized the other book as a ripoff of it. I can’t remember the title or author and it’s probably long out of print.
How I wish Willian Golding had written a few episodes of Gilligan’s Island.
Well, you see- Lord of the Flies is FICTION, and in real life children didnt act like that at all. LotF shows a false idea of what kids will do.
Comes closer to reality, actually.
Fiction? In a literature class?! Outrageous!
Well I don’t know where you went to school but a lot of my peers as children were pretty vicious. I wouldn’t put it past ‘em.
As an activist for the rights of children and youth, I also hate that book. This pessimistic speculative work of fiction has been put forward to me as an argument against youth rights. In fact, not long after the book was published, a group of teenage boys in real life ended up in basically the same situation as the boys in the novel, and the result was diametrically opposite, they established a functional commune. Here is one concise source for this story.
Do you understand that the book is not intended as a literal depiction of how children behave but rather an allegory of how war, violent parentage and cultural supremacy is passed on to subsequent generations?
I don’t know the entire range of the author’s intentions, I am only aware of the interpretation some people give the novel.
I grew up in ah, um some would say trashy, rural area. I witnessed some pretty monstrous things kids did to other kids, and that’s not even getting into how I was treated, but I had at least a few people giving me hell every single year I was a student, k-12. I think it’s pretty evident that most of the kids making the rest of us miserable got the shit beat out of them by their parents on a regular basis. It’s rare that this kind of behavior just comes out of nowhere. That is, I think, the reality depicted in that novel.
But is that the fault of the novel? Do we judge The Beatles by what Charles Manson got out of their music?
Or Wagner by what the Nazis got ou - wait a minute…
Charles Schulz famously used children to depict adult foibles and insecurities. His characters don’t behave like real children either.
Well, I never said to ban the novel, only that I personally dislike it.
Peanuts is also a highly caricatural work. It features a dog and bird that emulate human activity and act out fantasies, a set of kids whose parents and teachers are never seen but are known to be present, and a simplistic graphic style. Lord of the Flies is a novel that seems to be set in the real world, and therefore has the potential to be taken more seriously.
Make of the novel what you will, but I know of multiple cases where people used it as an argument for keeping young people under the firm thumb of adults.
Neither did I. I was asking if the value of a given work of art should be judged by the dumbest response to that art.
I actually laughed when Piggy died.
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Attributed to Oscar Wilde.
To be honest, using Lord of the Flies as required reading is, IMHO, a bad idea.
You know, I never used to laugh at dark things, until I read the first Reacher novel and then Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which was so relentlessly bleak I could not take it seriously.
I wonder what it is that hits people as funny as opposed to horrifying.
I think it was the way he first introduced himself, adding “you shouldn’t call me Piggy,” thereby sealing his fate with that name. He looked at the situation as a way to reinvent himself, but kept getting in his own way. I think I saw myself when none of my schemes would work out and leave me worse off, and it was relief that Piggy would have to suffer that no longer.