10/10/19 Clara Lu PD 5

10/10/19
Clara Lu Pd 5
Blogger # 17

Aim: How does the symbolism depicted in Lord of the Flies contribute to Golding's comment on the human condition?

Do Now: Make a statement about last night's reading (Chapter 9) to your group mates.

After talking in our groups, people shared to the class that
- The chapter name ("A View to a Death") foreshadowed that someone would die.
- By the end of the chapter, Simon remained the only good person. He wanted to tell the other boys that the Beast was not real, but was instead brutally murdered.
- Simon represented the remaining sanity that lived in the boys.

From the do now, we talked about what different objects represented from an American perspective.


American flag represented
- Pride                                               - Freedom
- Nationalism                                     -Unity
- The 13 stripes = the 13 colonies
- The 50 stars= the 50 states



                                               



Daoist Symbol - Yin-Yang represented
- Where there is good there is evil
- There is always a balance between the two








Buddhist Swastika represented
- Good and peace (it was on Buddhist monasteries)








However, our perspective of many things differs in other countries. For example, the Axis powers might see our flag as a reminder of the past, like how we bombed Japan. The Buddhist Swastika shows peace, however, Hitler literally flipped the sign and meaning of it. It became a sign of Nazis, World War II, and can be seen as the complete opposite from what the American flag represents.



Symbolism- object, actions, or characters meant to be taken both literally as a representation of significance that lies beyond ordinary meaning.

We reread pages 152-154 and talked about Simon's symbolism. At the end of chapter 9, Simon was coming down the mountain but the boys thought he was the Beast. But, they did call the person they were hurting, "Simon", showing they knew who it was. However, they continues to kill and wanted to. If they took a second to stop and realize what they were actually doing, the outcome of the book would be different. Simon could also be seen as a sacrifice and the boys are getting more and more distant from civilization and more towards madness. Ralph and Piggy, who were seen as more sensible in the beginning, but by the end of chapter 9, they joined Jack's group, chant, and savagery. When killing "the Beast", they were described as animals who "leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore (Golding 153)."



Reflection
Today I learned about the use of symbolism and how different people have different interpretations of the same thing. In different areas of the world, people see things from a different ways that we may not think of at first. In class, the monastery the swastika was on was covered and everyone thought it was the symbol for the German Nazi party. However, it was a symbol for Buddhism. In Lord of  the Flies Simon was the last chance of survival for the boys, but the mind of his friends were already changed and their common sense was gone. I learned this to further understand the book in the coming chapters. They are all stranded on an island and it's getting harder to return to a civilized life on the island and back to their lives before their plane was hit. We can also use what we learned in class today to have a more open mind. We have to learn to see both sides of the story and that both sides are real. In the book, there's good and bad in each of the characters, but after only reading the first few chapters, you would think Piggy and Ralph would remain sensible and eventually get the boys off the island, but they very easily joined Jack, and like the lesson from a couple of days ago, their level of savagery, they hit a point of no return when someone of their own was killed.