Lord of the Flies Summary and Breakdown. So You Haven't Read William Golding?

literature gives us the opportunity to experience lives perspectives and worlds different from our own though remember friend a good story has many readings and this is but one so england is on the verge of nuclear war but the good news is you're being evacuated from london but the bad news is your plane has been shot down on an uncharted island but the good news is you and some of the other passengers survived but the bad news there's a monster lurking on your island and one by one your fellow survivors succumb to the beast now all of that would be hard enough to deal with as an adult but now imagine having to face that when you're 12 like ralph in lord of the flies but i'm guessing based on the face you're making that you've never read it well totally fine let's not keep you in the dark [Applause] [Music] thanks so much to curiositystream for helping support today's literary discussion so you haven't read lord of the flies by william golding well you know what that means we're going to take a deep dive into the story so you can witness some of the darkest parts of the human psyche yay lord of the flies has been a standard in literature classes for decades because the novel's terrifying insight into human nature still rings true and you know because its symbolism is about as thick as the jungle of the uninhabited island where the story starts you are ralph a 12 year old boy whose evacuation plane has crashed on a deserted island no adults survived fortunately though you encounter another survivor an intellectual kid with glasses with the unfortunate nickname of piggy he shows you he just found a conch shell and knows that you can use it to alert other survivors of your location awesome you blow into it like a horn and a few of the other surviving boys head your way among them is a choir and their bully of a boy boss jack and when it comes time to elect a leader for all of these lost boys jack's furious that the others choose you over him so to placate his anger you suggest that he leads a hunting party a role that he relishes maybe a little too much dare i say foreshadowing even this early on we run into several of the book's major symbols the conch shell used to call the boys to order comes to symbolize organized society piggy's glasses are used to make fire and thus represent scientific achievement and then there's simon he's the second friend you make on the island who helps you build huts for the youngest boys and genuinely cares about the well-being of others readers often interpret him as something of a christ figure which coincidentally is not the figure you would want to be in any of these stories because that rarely ends well for them wait zoey how many chapters did i cover before i got sidetracked by symbolism and how many chapters are there again oh boy okay let's regroup and focus on a couple other major plot points first up the beast one of the young boys reports to you that he saw a terrifying monster in the forest which causes ripples of fear throughout the entire group piggy thinks it's just a figment of the child's imagination but jack announces that he and his hunters will find and kill the beast though their initial search yields nothing however that night a pilot who ejected from his plane over the island dies while parachuting down and his body ends up dangling from a tree then when you and some of the other boys see the shadow of the body in the twilight and hear the leathery flapping of his parachute from the wind in all of your minds the beast is terrifyingly real in lord of the flies golding's beast is humanity's inclination toward barbarism and he makes it abundantly clear that in their minds is the only place the monster actually exists the boys in the story use their false belief in an external beast to justify the gruesome acts of violence desired by their inner beasts and it's no coincidence that golden completed this book in the years following world war ii as humanity had just witnessed the horrifying consequences of supposedly civilized people turned savage also it should be noted that golding's depiction of savagery seems suspiciously like english stereotypes of non-western island cultures complete with war paint ritual dancing and pagan idols but on that note in real life there's actually evidence to suggest that when children raised in actual island cultures are isolated they behave in a strikingly different way famously when a group of real-life tongan boys were stranded on a desert island in 1965 they thrived for 14 months and took excellent care of each other so you know as a note if one were so inclined one might ask what it is about the western school system that led golding to believe were all genuine savages but you know that's that's none of my business oh that's a good shy where are we oh yeah as fear of the beast spreads you watch with growing anxiety as jack and his hunters break off from your civilization also his followers leave a horrific offering for the beast a pig's head on a stake the titular lord of the flies and at their new camp they perform frenzied dances reenacting the thrill of the hunt but it isn't just jack's followers that get sucked into this hysteria every night more boys sneak off to join jack's mob and even you and piggy eventually get swept up in the excitement which is when yet another horror occurs a figure bursts through the brush and in a frenzy you all believe it's the beast so in a state of rage and fear you all blindly join in killing it but when the thrill of the moment passes you're devastated to discover that the beast you slew was actually simon as all the boys absorb this new nightmare the tide comes in and carries his body out to sea horrified by the murder you decide you have to preserve social order but jack and his followers are no longer capable of seeing reason soon the conflict between you both comes to a head jack sends boyce to your hut to steal piggy's glasses and with no other option you and piggy travel to jack's camp with the conk in hopes of talking some sense into him piggy then tries to speak up but one of jack's followers pushes a rock onto him shattering the conch and sending your friend over a cliff to his death all jack needs to do now to cement his power is kill you so he sets the forest on fire to try to smoke you out while all of his hunters advance you flee from the young killers as the island is swallowed by flames and when you finally emerge from the forest to the beach you run directly into a naval officer who came ashore to inspect the flames he expresses shock that english boys could behave so despicably you know unlike the adults who were engaged in the potential world ending war like civilized people lord of the flies offers a terrifying view of humanity suggesting that all it would take for society to collapse is a crisis a charismatic strongman and fear and it still resonates strongly with many readers today because well we do keep seeing that very scenario playing out in real life and while great literature lets us look through other people's eyes sometimes it also gives us a chance to look inside ourselves in a moment of crisis would we be like the savage jack or the more civilized ralph and if we do choose the jack path will there be somebody to save us from our own viciousness and i know that this is some pretty heavy subject matter but lord of the flies does endure to this day because at the same time it's also an exciting visceral read you know part boy's adventure part existential horror story and good news you can enjoy this visit to the dark side from the safety of your own well-lit home or you know coffee shop when you read it for yourself you know if i was stranded on a desert island and i could only have one streaming service with me it would definitely be that's not a thing i was going to say i would want to keep watching all my favorite educational entertainers on the internet over on nebula our buy creators for creator streaming service not only can you get all of our shows on nebula without ads like this one but we've been building up a pretty nice collection of extra content over there as well i've done videos breaking down the openings of both bioshock and cowboy bebop can't wait for that inevitable crossover by the way my erroneously titled weekly podcast the only podcast about movies explores the conversations films start and of course the extra history team and i were able to craft an exclusive episode on tipu sultan thanks to nebula's support not to mention nebula is home to a ton of our other favorite internet folks as well such as cinema wins mary spender and legal eagle and because curiositystream is a fan of independent educational creators they've teamed up with us over at nebula so that we can offer you what in my humble opinion is the best deal in streaming today sign up for curiosity stream using our link in the description and you'll get a matching nebulous subscription for free and that's on top of curiosity streams thousands of big budget non-fiction videos and award-winning original series curated across their truly ginormous library of shows and you know with all of the wild talk in today's episode about kids getting lost in their imagination i was really excited to check out a different flavor of that topic in the documentary tell them anything you want a loving look at maurice sendak the author of one of my absolute favorite children's books where the wild things are where you get to go inside the mind of the man who told children's stories like no one else could let the wild rumpus start all you gotta do is head over to curiositystream.com extra credits to get a subscription to both curiosity stream and nebula for 26 off the regular price and to be clear that is not a trial account that's under 15 for a full year of both services then not only will you be watching some of the best content this series of tubes has to offer but you'll also be directly helping out us at extra credits in the process also as always thanks for sticking around till the end of the episode don't tell everybody else but you're my favorite greetings i'm ed ziad turk alecia bramble angelo valenciana casey muestia dominic valenciana joseph blame kyle murgatroyd and oreos1 y'all are the best [Music] you

Channel: Extra Credits

Views: 127,018

Keywords: Classics (Field of Study), So you Haven't Read, Education (TV Genre), Lord of the Flies (Book), William Golding (Author), Humanities (Field Of Study), Literary Criticism (Field Of Study), Book Review (Award Discipline), Classics (Field Of Study), Literature (Media Genre), Classic Literature, Literature Review (Literature Subject), animated, summary, explained, Analysis (Quotation Subject), young adult, Lord of the Flies (Movie), animated stories, edutainment

Id: rfLX0HZY5OE

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022