Making Connections (Summative Jornal)

Last Friday our lit circle spent way too long discussing a weak connection between our book, "Lord of the Flies", and the television series "Lost". We've explored that before, but only this time we realized how shallow our comparison would be due to the fact that none of us actually watched more than a few random episodes of the show, hence we could never be thorough enough when trying to explain specific similarities. Never the less we commented at least about the presence of the beast in both the book and the series. While in the book you end up with the conclusion that the beast was pure fear and the evil inside the children's hearts, which was there already just waiting for the stress of the unknown and the despair to trigger it as they start to notice that they lost everything that represented safety for them: "Grown-ups know things (...) They ain't afraid of the dark. They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be all right-" p. 101; in the series "lost" the approach is much more supernatural and "real" (to the characters), the beast is not a constant doubt, it is a fact. You can see it in the form of a thick black smoke that somehow is able to kill people, and as they say in 'Lord of the Flies' grown-ups tend to be more reasonable and would not be so easily scared without any evidence that their fears are justified, so I guess it was important to have this little change to make what is hunting them concrete enough so they can feel afraid of it. In a smaller note, both stories start with a plane crash with several survivors into an island, which is highly unlikely, since this kind of accident is one of most lethal and having one single person walking out intact would be already too lucky. I could also compare this sense of longing for the adults as a form of protection and even a reassuring presence just for the fact you know they are wiser and have more experience with the book I read a couple of days ago: "Coraline". In this last book Coraline is bored with her life and she is tired of her busy parents never having time for her, even though they work at home. She finds a whole new world behind a door in her own house, where 'another mother' awaits for her. This world is much more interesting and all adults seem to give Coraline their undivided attention all the time, there's only a little unsettling detail, behind that door people have big black buttons instead of eyes. Soon Coraline discovers that she made a terrible mistake not noticing earlier that everything was just too good to be true. Both books are fictional, but Coraline tends to go further in the 'fantastic fiction', while Lord of the Flies is pretty much 'something more likely to happen' in a way because at least it's not in a parallel world. My point with all of this is that although in the specific situation the kids find themselves when stranded in the island, they seem to believe that adult world is safer, that's not always the truth. There are as many degenerated 'Jacks' that are grown-ups as there are younger ones. So when Piggy constantly talks about his "auntie" which is suppose to be the adult opinion about something, it can be just as flawed as any other opinion, of course most of the times it represents the sensible side of adulthood instead of the dark side, since the kids are pretty deep in darkness themselves: "My auntie told me not to run (...) on account of my asthma.". Unfortunately in the end Piggy's sensible voice was forever silenced by a boulder rolled by Roger on purpose, but for the other kids salvation did come in the form of an adult, a naval officer, to be more specific: "We'll take you off. How many of you are there?".Finally, Coraline wasn't so lucky, with her real parents locked away and betrayed by all adults in the 'other world' she could only rely on her own bravery and intelligence to escape, but that's a whole different story, so my comparison ends here.

Explaining Poem: The Sound of the Conch

I'll start from the most obvious (and therefore boring) and try to go deeper. The image in the end, is basically the cover of the book, which shows the head of a pig in a stick. I chose this particular image because it represents the violence and darkness that I wanted my poem to show, and also because after all the pig's head IS the "Lord of the Flies". The title refers to the shell used in the book by Ralph to summon the other kids for meetings, and thus it represents society and order, as oppose to the primitive state that some kids embraced later on, it is as I said in the poem "The sound of reason". To set the mood of the book I started my poem with the kids getting lost in the island, specifically at night (navy-blue sky), because it's usually during that period that the book goes deeper in the darkness of the human soul. I included the "scar" that the plane crash creates in the forest to show that the island was never an evil place on its own, it needed the darkness inside each individual to turn into an ugly and violent place. "Kill all innocence" refers to Simon's death, because from that moment on things went downhill and you couldn't predict what the kids would do next. The shorter verses that I repeated several times with small adaptations were meant to give some pace to the poem, like the tribal songs that Jack always sings, and they evolved following the plot of the book, showing at the end a Symbol to Piggy's death, the last one before they are rescued. I also included the "masks" that Jack and his choir use to cover their faces as they do the most terrible things shamelessly and the "stick sharpened at both ends" that impales the pig's head and later on is used to show that Jack intends to give Ralph the same treatment. All in all I think I did a good job getting the mood of the book into something much shorter, I'm very proud of how I could really feel in my poem the darkness, the doubt and the violence when people turn against each other with no better reason than envy and pride.

Making Connections

Last Friday our lit circle spent way too long discussing a weak connection between our book, "Lord of the Flies", and the television series "Lost". We've explored that before, but only this time we realized how shallow our comparison would be due to the fact that none of us actually watched more than a few random episodes of the show, hence we could never be thorough enough when trying to explain specific similarities. Never the less we commented at least about the presence of the beast in both the book and the series. While in the book you end up with the conclusion that the beast was pure fear and the evil inside the children's hearts, which was there already just waiting for the stress of the unknown and the despair to trigger it as they start to notice that they lost everything that represented safety for them: "Grown-ups know things (...) They ain't afraid of the dark. They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be all right-" p. 101; in the series "lost" the approach is much more supernatural and "real" (to the characters), the beast is not a constant doubt, it is a fact. You can see it in the form of a thick black smoke that somehow is able to kill people, and as they say in 'Lord of the Flies' grown-ups tend to be more reasonable and would not be so easily scared without any evidence that their fears are justified, so I guess it was important to have this little change to make what is hunting them concrete enough so they can feel afraid of it. In a smaller note, both stories start with a plane crash with several survivors into an island, which is highly unlikely, since this kind of accident is one of most lethal and having one single person walking out intact would be already too lucky. In conclusion I think that now that most of the group has finished the whole book we can finally go to the most interesting connections that can be found near the end, and we'll try to do that in the next opportunity we have to share our thoughts in class.