Boekverslag William Golding

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Geschreven door:	Mick
Niveau:	4VWO
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Taal:	Engels
Woorden:	1370
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Titels van William Golding

• Lord of the flies / Heer der vliegen (33)

  1954

• The Inheritors (0)

  1955

William Golding
Lord of the flies

On the cover of the book I see a boy with a fish in his hands, looking at the sunset. It looks like he has just caught the fish. The picture of the boy on the cover looks mysterious because you can’t see the boy very clearly. You can only see his back, which is a shadow. It makes me think of tribes in the rainforest in South-America en Africa, who don’t have any shops but have to hunt to get food, just like our forefathers thousands of years ago. I think this book is about a tribe in the Amazon which is in danger because of the disappearance of the rain forest.

The book has got twelve chapters, all of them have got titles and are about 20 pages. The whole story has 225 pages. On the first page of the book you can find information about the author (where he was born, which books he has written, how many prices he has won for his books). Then there is a page on which you can find the titles of the chapters and the pages where they start. After this the story itself begins. Then there are a few pages on which you can find information about other books written by William Golding, and after that a form which you can send to an organisation in England to order other books of the author.

You can find a lot of information about the author of the book in the book itself. William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. He has done many different jobs in his life. He has worked as an actor, a lecturer, a small craft sailor, a musician and finally a school master. He joined the royal navy in 1940, where he was in charge of a rocket sheep during the second world war. After the war he returned to the school where he had worked and started writing novels. Lord of the flies was his first novel, it was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961 and spend his time to write twelve more novels including The Inheritors, pincher Martin and the spire. He won the booker price for his novel rites of passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel price for literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in the summer of 1993, leaving a draft of a novel, the double Tongue. I haven’t found any more important information about the writer on the internet. I haven’t read anything from this author before, but I have chosen this book, because the story looked exiting to me.

After reading the first chapter:
A plane which is full of children, who are evacuated because there is war at home, crashes on an uninhabited island in the pacific ocean. The children have survived the crash, but there aren’t any grown-up’s on the island, so they have to keep each other alive till they will be rescued. Two boys who were on the plane, Ralph and piggy, meet on the beach after the crash. Piggy sees a shell on the beach and Ralph tries to make sound with it, it works and all the other kids come to the place where he is. The children decide that they have to choose a leader. Ralph and another boy, Jack, want to be the leader, but the children vote Ralph. The whole first chapter, which is about 30 pages, describes only a short time, probably half an hour.
The author uses short sentences and many dialogues. There are parts of the book, like the beginning, where 2 or 3 pages are filled with a long dialogue between two or more boys, with sentences which give you extra information about, for example the surrounding area.

But most of the dialogues are short and the author describes the places where the characters are and describes the feelings of the different characters very good, so you can better understand where they are, how they are organized, what kind of characters they are and why they do things like they do them. The author doesn’t use flash forwards and not much flashbacks. The story is, for the biggest part, told from the begin to the end. The most important flashback is in the first chapter. After you have read the flashback you know why the children were on the plane and what happened before the crash. There are many different parts in the story, but after I read them I knew the most important things. By most of the difficult words I found out the meaning after reading the rest of the sentence. The story is told through the eyes of the storyteller, who knows everything about the characters and their thoughts and feelings.

The theme of the book is how people associate with each other. The boys on the island quarrel with each other about the most important thing on the island: hunting and making fun or have rules and make smoke, so they can be rescued by a ship. At the end of the book they kill each other because of these simple things, just like grown-up’s have done in history and still do in some countries.

The most important thing I have learnt from this novel is that every human has something evil in him/her, which becomes clear in situations like the one on the island. I can’t imagine that a group of boys could do something horrible like killing someone, it really shocked me. I would call this novel an adventure roman, because it describes the time that the children have lived on the island. In that time lots of things happen on the island (two boys are killed, the group falls apart in two tribes).

The climax of the story takes place in the last chapter. Jack Mendrew, one of the boys on the island, doesn’t want Ralph as chief any longer. He set up his own tribe and nearly all the boys join his tribe. Jack’s tribe attacks Ralph’s tribe at night, Jack’s tribe goes back after they have stolen Piggy’s specs. Now Ralph’s isn’t able to make fire any more and, the worst thing is, Piggy can’t see anything without his specs, he’s blind now. Ralph wants Piggy’s specs back and decides that he, Piggy and two other boys are going to Jack’s tribe. Jack doesn’t want to give the specs back and quarrels with Ralph. The boys of Jack’s tribe kill Piggy with spears, wound Ralph and tie up the two other boys who are with them. Ralph escapes and tries to hide in the forest. Jack and his tribe try to find and kill Ralph, but can’t find him. Ralph runs out of the forest and gets to the beach, where he meets a marine officer, who has come to the island because he saw smoke coming from the island. Ralph and the other boys are safe. The officer thinks the boys have had a good time on the island, but is shocked when he hears about the two kills.

Lord of the flies means Beelzebub, which is a synonym for Satan. This word refers to the children on the island and the bad things in them which becomes clear on the island. Not the dead parachutist who landed on the island was the cause of all evil on the island, it were the children themselves.

Lord of the flies is a good book, which is easy to read. The book is well-written, because you sympathise with the persons in the story while you read the book, you feel like you are on the island, which keeps you interested. You want to find out how the book ends, if the boys will be rescued. The thing which impressed me most was the dead of Piggy at the end. I can’t imagine that a group of boys could do something so terrible. I would surely recommend this book to other students, especially to the ones who are interested in exciting books.