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Revision

I decided to work on my literary analysis because it was not one of my better papers that I wrote this year and I feel that it had a significant amount of room for improvement. When going over this paper by reading it aloud, I realized that my sentence fluency was not very consistent. I also realized that my word choice was poor, which it why the significant portion of my changes are to change were finding a better word for the message which I was trying to convey in the sentence. So I think that my overall syntax was a weakness in this paper that I feel could have been improved if I put in a little more effort. Another thing that I feel was weak in this paper was my ability to smoothly transition from one paragraph to the next. I tried to improve my transitions comparing the point made it the previous paragraph to the current one. I feel that I strongly improved this paper to have a strong revision to my Lord of the Flies literary analysis on leadership.




Leadership
            Imagine living on a world of anarchy, with no source of leadership. In Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Golding insinuates that, among the boys on the island, there is no strong leadership. The boys on the island lack a leader who is both mentally stable and truly confident, which are critical traits of a leader. Although this literary device (deus ex machina) is not essential in contrasting the boy’s leadership to the naval officer’s leadership, the deus ex machina is used to solve a very complex or seemingly unsolvable problem of bringing the story to a “happy ending.” In Lord of the Flies, William Golding uses the naval officer to illustrate how the boys will interact with the adult world which exemplifies strong authority, unlike the leaders on the island prior to the arrival of the naval officer.
            At the very end of Lord of the Flies, the naval officer arrives to save the boys from the island, and the boys appear to be terrified of him. The naval officer is the deus ex machina, but he mainly represents traits that are lacking among these mentally unstable and fundamentally immature boys on the island. When the boys realize that an adult is on the island, they believe that he is only there to stop the “fun” that they were having. When the boys stopped being obnoxious and rambunctious, “[t]he ululation faltered and died away” (200). At the arrival of the strong authority, the boys are anxious because they also fear strong authority and leadership.
The naval officer’s strong and real authority on the island is what strikes fear into the boys. The boys believe that the naval officer is trying to demean their survival techniques, by almost immediately trying to identify what they did wrong on the island. The naval officer unquestionably treats the boys on the island like children, but the boys feel like they have grown in maturity since landing on the island. When the naval officer states that he “should have thought” that the boys didn’t have a census, he was demeaning their authoritative abilities (201). This is evidence that the naval officer has stronger authority than the leaders of the island since they couldn’t even gather an enumeration of the boys on the island.
            Jack Merridew is one of the main boys on the island who tries to step up as a leader, which results in fatal consequences. Jack is first to lose mental stability on the island because of his urge to kill a pig, which eventually leads to his urge to kill the other boys on the island. When Jack realizes that he doesn’t want to be under Ralph’s leadership, he begins to stray from the group of boys and creates his own secret clan, with anyone welcome to join. The only (but significant) difference with this secret clan is that Jack is the leader, and the central goal of that clan is to kill. However, when Jack realizes that help has arrived on the island, he realizes that he is no longer the most influential person on the island, because all of the boys know the adults hold more authority than any single child. When the narrator labels Jack as “the little boy,” Jack turns back into the young boy before he was trapped on the island and turned savage (201). Jack “wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap on his red hair and [who] carried the remains of spectacles at his waist, started forward, then changed his mind and stood still” (201). This represents Jack’s surrender of power. Jack’s sanity is somewhat restored due to the presence of an adult. The reader realizes that Jack turns back into the quiet young boy he once was because he recognizes his own weakness.
            The boys on the island are very immature. Not only are they malicious to one another, but they are each naive as individuals.  For example, the boys use immature words such as “’Whee-oh!’/ ‘Wacco!’/ ‘Bong!’/ ‘Doink!’” (33). These words repeat throughout the book and symbolize the boys’ immaturity. Figures of strong authority would never use such juvenile language, which is what exemplifies to the weak authority on the island.
            Ralph is the first leader on the island in Lord of the Flies, and he is a bad example because he is not authoritative; he is a bully. Before he becomes a leader and throughout the book, Ralph continually refers to the character whom the reader knows only as Piggy, (because of Ralph) “Piggy”. Piggy tells Ralph that “’ They used to call me ‘Piggy.’” Then “Ralph shrieked with laughter. He jumped up. / ‘Piggy! Piggy!’/ Ralph – please’/ Piggy clasped his hands in apprehension. / ‘I said I didn’t want – ‘/ ‘Piggy! Piggy!’” (11).  Piggy doesn’t want Ralph to call him Piggy, but Ralph goes out of his way to torture him for personal pleasure. An important quality of a strong leader is maturity and empathy for others, which Ralph lacks.
             Another example of Jack indulging his ego and doing whatever he pleases is the primary voting outcome and process. The chaos on the island and the lack of maturity among the boys results in votes being taken for an official leader. No one is a strong enough leader to be able to lead the group without casting a vote. When the boys cast their votes, the boys in Jack’s choir are the only boys that vote for Jack because they feel inclined to vote for him. Everyone else votes for Ralph, and he becomes the first leader of the island. The choir wants Jack to like them, so the voting of the leader was essentially a popularity contest. The reader knows this because “[w]ith dreary obedience, the choir raised their hands” (23). The polling for the leader of the island is carried out like that of children.. Jack uses his previous knowledge of the choir boys to guilt them in to voting for him. The main idea to take away from the way the boys went about this situation is that the voting process was juvenile.
            Throughout the novel, the boys exemplify immaturity and lack of strong authority. The naval officer’s arrival makes the boys cower in fear because they worry that the officer will scold them because they haven’t behaved on the island. The naval officer represents real authority, which the boys on the island were lacking. The boys display constant examples of their immaturity, by saying immature words, bullying boys on the island, and revealing their immature demeanor throughout the story. Even the leaders on the island are especially immature as reflected by tormenting the boys below them and not rising to the occasion when a leader is truly needed. All of these aspects of the story are evidence of weak authority.

Works Cited
 Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Penguin, 1954.

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