What physical features of the island seem significant? How do Ralph, Jack and Simon respond to the physical landscape & what does this reveal about their characters?
A major aspect about the physical features of the island is that it is in fact in the shape of boat the very thing that they desire to be rescuing them from the island giving it an irony of how they are stuck on something in the from of their safety and freedom. “It was roughly oat shaped” this is just a brief description of the island that they are stuck on demonstrating exactly what I said before that they are almost on the thing that they are looking for and yet they can not use it. “A circular horizon of water” there is water around the entire island trapping them in there giving it the feel of a watery prison with no escape. The island is in this book shown as the paradise island of perfection and tranquility that we all search for as the perfect spot for relaxation and yet on this perfect island the most fowl deeds imaginable are committed. There are constant references to the children getting entangled in the creepers once again demonstrating how underneath the ideal setting of the island there is a more sinister undertone to it. “Immured in these tangles” this illustrates how the creepers like every thing else on the island is trapping them and holding them down to the island making very difficult to escape. However possibly one of the most sinister and least noticeable o all of the islands features is its tall pink rocks. They are always described as being imposing jagged and sharp, “the jagged outline of the crags up towards he mountain.” This quote gives us some sense of the imposing threat and importance of the mountains. They are always a sign of danger even later in the book it is where they believe that the monster is, I contrast to this they also did signify hope when the fire was up there. The pinkness of the rocks does in its self have significance, it could be seen as the purity of Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage at that all are by nature nice and born good hearted and it is just the corruption of society that can turn tem away from this, this purity could be represented by the colour of white. In opposition to this view there is the view of Hobbs who believes that if several people were put in a place with no rules life would be “nasty, brutish and short” this idea of blood and killing could be represented as red. We could see that in the colour of pink for the rocks we can see the purity of child hood going a and being soaked under the blood of a word without rules, like Wordsworth’s crossing the threshold once the protection of law and discipline (represented by adults) people become very different.
