Character Sketch. Jack Merridew

Character Sketch

Jack Merridew

In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, savage, cruel Jack is contrasted with the calm and reasonable Ralph. He wants to be a leader, to have power. Jack’s character is the embodiment of evil and he can be seen as a disease of the island. He uses fear to control the boys, manipulates them with their wants and desires and has a unique force that drives him.

Jack was accustomed to power from the very beginning. He was the head boy in the choir. So when Ralph was chosen to be in charge, he was expectedly disappointed. While Ralph and the other boys were building shelters and making up rules, Jack was exploring the jungle until he came across a pig. This is how he finds his purpose on the island. By killing a pig, he wants to show the other boys his strength and set his goals. And he does a good job by slowly capturing the minds of little boys. He realizes that the boys don't want to work with Ralph, they want to have fun and play. And a pig hunt is just the thing to entertain the boys, who, moreover, have been eating only fruit for a long time.

Jack begins to change and develops a crazy and violent side. We see this when his hunting job starts to take over his mind. It was a feeling or thought that was taking over his life and killing a pig became the only thing he could think about. Soon, together with his choirboys, he puts dazzle paint on his face, behind which he was liberated from shame and self-consciousness. He then comes up with a war dance with the words “Kill the pig, cut her throat, spill the blood”. These cruel, savage lines soon become their anthem and completely take over their minds. The chant shows how savage they have become under Jack’s instructions.

The next step for Jack is the appearance of the Beast. When the boys are discussing who will go up the mountain and find the beast Jack asks Ralph in a challenging and mocking tone whether he is coming with him. We can see Jack try to manipulate the situation so he can take control from Ralph and lead the group. Soon Jack finally gets what he wants and becomes the chief of all the boys. By providing the pig meat for the boys he created an army of followers that will blindly obey his every word and fulfill his lust for power. However, his control of them is made through fear and he dominates the other boys through force and threat. It didn't take long for Jack to become a massive dictator. However, at the very end, when the officer askswho the boss is, Jack hesitates to come out, realizing that he is too weak to be responsible for the deaths of the two boys.

In conclusion, Jack is shown by William Golding as the true devil who lives in every human soul. He could not hide behind a screen of the rules and attitudes of Ralph's society, and became a window to freedom for the other boys. He is a brute force who has been included to show what happens if the rules are taken away. Jack is the figure of a little savage that lives in all of us.

Summary

" Lord of the Flies" is a novel written by Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding in 1954. " Lord of the Flies" was conceived by the writer as a response to R. M. Ballantyne's naive novel Coral Island. Golding’s novel is a realist response to the work of a romantic. He decided to tell the story of the devil who lives in every human soul, but is forced to hide behind the moral attitudes to which society subordinates the individual. Golding, a true pessimist, tried to prove that the Beast lives in everyone's soul from birth and that the main thing in life is not to let it break out.

Ralph Rover is the only hero leftfrom Ballantyne’s novel in" Lord of the Flies". He becomes elected as a leader in the first hours of the disaster when a group of children found themselves stranded on a tropical uninhabited island, Ralph gained respect by talking right things and displaying a beautiful bright shell.

Ralph, remembering the ideas of democracy, immediately starts with the advice and support of Piggy to teach the crowd of six or seven-year-old boys order, discipline, and duty. Ralph makes a signal fire the group's first priority, hoping that a passing ship will see the smoke signal and rescue them. A major challenge to Ralph's leadership is Jack, who also wants to lead. Jack is in charge of choirboys who sacrifice the duty of looking after the fire so that they can participate in the hunts. Jack draws the other boys slowly away from Ralph's influence because of their natural attraction to the adventurous hunting. Ralph soon finds that not biguns, not littluns have no interest in working and following the rules.

Soon the conflict between Jack and Ralph arises —the conflict between savagery and civilization. Thisis escalated by the boys' literal fear of a mythical beast roaming the island. In a reaction to this fear, Jack forms a group that is eventually joined by all but a few of the boys. The boys who join Jack are attracted by the protection provided by Jack's ferocity and by the prospect of playing the role of savages: putting on dazzle paint to their faces, hunting, and performing ritual tribal dances. In the end, Jack's group kills a sow and puts the pig's head on a stick as an offering to the beast.

Of all the boys, only Simon is able to discover the true nature of the beast. As it turns out, it was the pilot of a military plane that was shot down at night. After the sow's death and the offering of her head to the beast, Simon begins to hallucinate, and the sow's impaled head turns into the Lord of the Flies, transmitting to Simon what he had already suspected: The Beast is not an animal on the loose, it lurks in every boy's psyche. Weakened by the terrible vision, Simon loses consciousness. Trying to break the news to the other boys, he bumps into them on a dark night as they were excited by the tribal dance. When Simon starts crashing through trees, the boys think he is a monster, and all the boys, including Ralph and Piggy, attack him in terror, killing him.

Soon only the three older boys, including Piggy, remain at Ralph's camp. Meanwhile, Jack realized that although the conch is a symbol of power, the true power lies in Piggy's glasses, the group's only means of kindling a fire. And Jack's group steals Piggy's glasses to start a cooking fire. When Ralph and his small group approach Jack's tribe to demand the glasses back, one of Jack's hunters drops a heavy rock on him, killing Piggy and destroying the conch. The tribe captures the other two biguns, leaving Ralph alone.

The tribe sets up a hunt for Ralph to kill him. They build a fire to smoke him out of one of the shelters, resulting in a fire all over the island. A passing ship notices the smoke from the fire, and a British naval officer arrives ashore just in time to save Ralph from certain death at the hands of schoolboy-turned-feralists.

In conclusion, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a novel that shows the theme of savagery versus civilization. Ralph represents civilization because he wants to make rules and give everyone an equal say. Whereas Jack represents savagery because he controls the boys and is not interested in what they have to say. Through the boys' actions, Golding shows us that it is not the rules that make society right, but its people.

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