Analysis of Lord of the Flies by Golding William - Assignment Example

Lord of the Flies Part There is a massive connection between the characters and their group dynamics in “Lord of the flies” and what was taking place in the film about the Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo. In the study, the participants acted according to the role they had been assigned. They took these roles seriously and thus even forgot that they were just acting. Those in positions of power took advantage of their position to humiliate, degrade, discriminate and mistreat those in lower positions (the guards were in position of power while the prisoners had minimal or no power at all). The same is true in “Lord of the flies,” where those assigned the positions of power like Jack and Ralph to play the role of leaders of the group really took this task seriously. Jack for example like the guards in the Stanford prison experiment started degrading those in a lower power position and made them follow him and act according to his instructions failure to which resulted in dehumanizing acts like the time they took Piggy’s glasses whereas they knew the importance of the glasses to Piggy. The group conformity in a bid to get social identity as resulted from Solomon Asch’s research also connects and explains the group behavior observed in the film “Lord of the flies.” When Jack decides to go on his own and become a hunter thus breaking away from the initial group who had survived the crash, many of the group members follow him. They do this not because they want to or because of the promises of meat made to them but because they are afraid of being outcasts which is considered a social punishment. Most of those who follow jack are his fellow choir group who want to identify with their intragroup in order to gain social identity. Obedience as observed in Milgram’s obedience research film where in spite of the participants being aware of the negative effects of their actions they still obeyed and administered the shocks is evident in the film “Lord of the flies.” Jack is an authority figure in his intragroup and the rest of the group members obey him and his commands no matter how atrocious they sound or the negative consequences it impacts on the intergroup members (who are in this case Ralph’s group). As a result of this obedience to the authority, Simon and Piggy are killed by the members of Jack’s group. Prior to that, Jack commands that they raid Ralph’s group and steal Piggy’s glasses which are used to light the fire and none of the group members refuses to go despite being aware of the fact that Piggy uses the glasses to see. Part 2 After the initial group forming (which is represented by the time when the boys were scared and had no alternative but to stick together) storming stage starts with disagreements about leadership and this is the beginning of the changes in group dynamics. Jack breaks away from the group to form his own group and this brings about issues of establishing group boundaries, group bonding and the in-group out-group rivalry begins with each group favoring their in-group members and seeing the out-group as nothing but outcasts. The rituals started by Jack and which are ultimately followed by his in-group members of hunting, applying mud on their faces and chanting songs like savages brings them closer together hence establishing group bonding. This lifestyle they chose is different from what Ralph’s group is doing (as they maintain civilization they initially had when they first landed in the island) and hence group boundaries are created by these differences (Golding, 77). Important symbols like Piggy’s glasses which represent life and power as they are the only ones that can light a fire lead to further cementing group boundaries and bonding. The fire which is created by the glasses brings the group together as one as they gather around it to warm and cook and keeps the other group further away. The concho which is also a symbol of intelligence and authority through advising the leader further acts to bond the group together. This is probably the reason why Jack’s group breaks the concho and steals the glasses to bring their group closer together and create boundaries with the out-group (Ralph’s group). The fear of the imaginary “beast” which a few of the boys have further acts to drift the group apart since some of the group members believed in the beast while the others did not. Jack believed in the beast and even set out to find and kill it and this brave action enticed the scared boys to join his group once he broke up from the main group. This group with its agenda of defeating the beast (which in the real sense was just a cadaver) found that they bonded more and continued to separate and drift away from the other group that did not believe in beast. This fear however made them kill Simon whom they thought was the beast when he crawled into their camp to tell them that the beast was nothing but a cadaver. Jack’s group drifted further apart from Ralph’s group and they started seeing them as out-group as they were non-believers of the beast (Golding, 132). Even though both Ralph and Jack were chosen as the leaders of the group and they eventually became rival leaders each heading his own group, they had different leadership styles. Jack was an authoritarian leader who wanted everything to go as per his suggestions and he always had the last word and no one was to challenge his authority. This style of leadership can be attributed to the fact that he is an instrumental leader whose aim is to complete the tasks he has started no matter the consequences. This perhaps explains why he easily attacked the out-group without remorse and even killed pigs as a way to exercise his superiority. Ralph on the other hand is a democratic leader who listens to people’s opinion and aims at unifying the group in order to come up with solutions as a group and not as an individual. He does this successfully for a while when he divides the group into teams to take care of shelter and fire hence ensuring everyone in the group is responsible. Unlike Jack however, Ralph is emotional and that is why when Piggy’s glasses are stole, his emotions lead him to Jack’s camp to demand them back not because of the fire but because Piggy is his friend and uses them for vision. This leadership style and emotional nature makes him however fail to control the group or keep them together. Conformity evidenced in Jack’s group that is brought about by obedience to Jack as the authority figure and peer pressure leads to incidences of deindividuation among the group members. They do not think on their own but act according to what they are told and according to what is being done by the rest of the group (groupthink). The deindividuation and groupthink ideologies lead the group members to kill Simon and Piggy and also want to kill Ralph who even though escapes, they pursue relentlessly. This represents Georg Simmel’s ideologies of how a triad operates and how different it is from a dyad (like in Ralph’s group where individuation is maintained). Part 3 Asch’s conformity study discusses in details the role of group conformity in social identity where people conform to group decisions not because they are right but because majority of the group they identify with makes that decision and the do not want to be termed as social outcasts or lack social identity where they lack a group to identify themselves with. This study is seen in the recent 2010 Arab Springs where Arab countries ousted their leaders through mass actions and demonstrations with thousands of the people participating in the demonstrations, killing, burning, looting and basically destroying their countries (Manhire, 143). The demonstrations started in Tunisia and later spread to other Arab nations like Egypt, Libya and Syria. What all these people had in common was the fact that they are Arabs and their leaders were seen as dictators. With the mass actions and demonstrations taking place in the streets, the participants destroyed as a group. Deindividuation was evident where the leaders of the demonstrations made the rules and the rest followed. The killing and ousting of the presidents of Libya and Egypt was as a result of groupthink. For example even when Gaddafi surrenders, the mob does not heed to his pleas but just go ahead and kill him. If there was no groupthink and individuation was the prevalent factor, the plea for surrender would have been considered. These demonstrations also had leaders behind them whose agenda was to take over leadership. The followers of the leaders obeyed authority just like those in Milgram’s study did not caring that in the process innocent people and property was being destroyed. Orders to bomb and kill people by the leaders in the Arab Spring was not met with resistance and this further accelerated the war and made it spread to other Arab countries as well and increased the casualties. Work Cited Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Penguin, 1954. Manhire, Toby. The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution, and a New World Order. New York: Random House, 2012. Read More