Lord of the Flies - Explore how Golding uses the character Simon to bring out the novels themes.

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English Coursework

Lord of the Flies

1 – Explore how Golding uses the character Simon to bring out the novels themes.

There are various themes and ideas throughout the story and Golding uses Simon to bring out all the religious imagery and ideas in the novel, except for the last chapter. Piggy is the person who brings out the political themes in the novel, these themes are democracy vs. dictatorship. With Ralph representing the democracy side of things and jack running a dictatorship, this could also be interpreted as Good vs. Evil.
        We know Simon brings out all the Religious imagery and this is added to by the fact he is the only character in the story to have a name from the bible. To look at Simon is a skinny, vivid little boy and he had short, coarse black hair, but in one of the versions of the films we watched Simon was given fair hair to give an even bigger hint that he is good.

Throughout the story there are two main outsiders and these are Piggy and Simon and they often fall victim to the others calling them “batty”. Piggy, it seems, was bound to be an outsider from birth. Because he has Asthma, he’s overweight, he has a funny voice and accent and he has no sense of humour but he is the most intelligent boy on the island and has the most common sense. He often sum’s things up and tells things like they are, and perhaps most importantly he thinks like a grown up would do. He represents the minority groups in the real world. Even his name isolates him in some ways because he’s called piggy because he is like “piggy in the middle” of the power struggle between Jack and Ralph. As for Simon, he is normal to look at but he has this strange condition where most of the time he is fine but he can easily slip into this episode kind of thing. During one of these he would separate himself from the rest of the group and then feint. But Simon does seem to have some psychological powers and they usually surface when he’s having one of his episodes. These psychological powers make some very important predictions throughout the story.

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Simon often plays the good Samaritan aswell in the story and goes out of his way and makes sacrifices to help others. This is shown right at the beginning when Simon and Ralph work very hard to make shelters whilst everyone else is off bathing. And also he collects some fruit for the littluns on page 71, this is seen as the Christian thing to do. And he is seen doing the good thing again when Jack won’t give Piggy any meat off the pig they just caught and Simon rips of half of his piece of meat and gives ...

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