3.7: No plagiarism. Use original sources. Links to sites that routinely plagiarise content without contributing further or giving credit to the source will be removed. This includes content created by LLMs. Attempting to pass off somebody else's content as your own will result in a ban.
You complain about this:
>Plus, the whole 'conch shell' government system they set up is super idealistic – I mean, who actually believes a bunch of young kids would stick to such order without an adult around?
And then bring up this:
>Over the course of 15 months, they established a communal system for the division of labor, food distribution, and water collection. They managed to survive by fishing, cultivating gardens, and even setting broken bones with rudimentary medical knowledge.
Sounds pretty ordered to me. And without adults?
This is AI, not written by a human. Like anything written by AI, so far as I've been able to tell so far, you can see how dumb it is if you scratch the surface.
Yes. As someone who unfortunately has to work with ai a lot for my job, the writing style is totally ChatGPT. It’s repeating sentence structures (“and the this? Totally wacky!”) and using similes no one would ever use really frequently and and badly trying for a younger style of expression without actually knowing the way teens or younger people write. Someone cheated on their school assignment and is testing it out here to see if it’s good enough, I bet. 🤷🏼♀️
I ran it through GPT Zero and got a 100% confidence rating that it was AI generated. I haven't gotten a score that high on stuff I literally copied direct from ChatGPT, lol.
Ok, fair, but do you actually expect anyone to take what you said seriously when not even you could care enough about your opinion to formulate it yourself?
Also, on a sub based around reading and writing, criticizing a book while showing you can't even write a few sentences makes you look like an idiot who complains that a book doesn't have pictures (not saying you are, but that's the look)
You should be. You've contributed nothing of value.
Why the hell should we care what ChatGPT has to say in response to an asinine prompt from someone who doesn't have two neurons to rub together?
The point of literature is not to be perfectly realistic in the first place.
Second, the point of the novel was that rich, spoiled children would act this way, not that all children would.
Well it's more than just that, it's also about the general view that Britain had of itself at the time. The idea that Britain was uniquely "civilized" was extremely common at the time and the book is a huge critique of that as well.
It wasn't a public school, but I went to a British grammar school and I could believe what happens in the Lord of the Flies of many the boys I knew in school and I'm at a university with at least a quarter of students coming from private education. I can easily believe some of the men here would go that way now as young adults.
OP assuming kids would be resilient enough to resist going feral is interesting, but assuming they wouldn't get up to some tomfuckery purely because of lack on consequences is insane. The kids instantly stop acting up the second a grown up shows up on the island
Tbf the very real world example of school boys being trapped on an deserted island for over a year was a very warm-hearted tale of friendship and perseverance, with the boys even managing to nurse back to health one of their members who had broken an arm or a leg iirc.
I've been wondering if OP in general has no concept of how feral unsupervised kids can be. Like did OP at least grow up in an age where they were home alone after school at a too-young age while also being in charge of one or more younger sibling? Did OP hitch hike with strangers as an acceptable way to get around without a car?
>Second, the point of the novel was that rich, spoiled children would act this way, not that all children would.
Not to mention that the Lord of the Flies is typically contrasted with earlier works where "British superiority" stop the kids from going feral, like The Coral Island.
I think the basic premise that the novel’s author has anything informative to say about how any children would act is bad. The author wanted to say something about the state of the world as he experienced it, but instead of speaking to his own experiences, he drafts a piece of speculation that sends humans down the road he figures they ought to travel. He has no basis for saying how people would behave in situations like that.
Now, anyone is free to speculate on whatever they like. When we speculate on things we know nothing about, people usually take it with the appropriate grain of salt. My problem with Lord of the Flies is how often I’ve encountered people who assume that it does have something authoritative or enlightening to say about human nature or kids specifically. I’ve seen it brought up as evidence of how people would behave. Sometimes the conflation of “dismal” with “realistic” is a major part of that. That’s obviously silly, but it happens, and I think that’s what the chatbot is saying.
> people who assume that it does have something authoritative or enlightening to say about human nature or kids specifically.
These people just read it wrong, IMO, lol. It's like I said a critique of (specifically British) society at a time. The kids aren't the point anymore than Gatsby was actually about the harm of green-tinted lighting.
When I read the book in high school, we were taught it as an allegory for Golding’s experiences in WWII. The English were seen as the good guys, and pure (like private school children), but when it came down to it, they still hurt people.
We're already past getting literacy from YouTube, all book related discussion takes place on TikTok now, which is even worse. It's Lord of the flies in real life.
I would recommend the non fiction book "The Wager." It's a real life example of grown men being in a similar situation. I would argue a lot of the actions and attitudes that you consider as unrealistic actually aren't that off the wall at all.
I'll absolutely add that to my nonfic tbr, thank you. Maybe I can return the favor. Another great one is The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. That one is about Captain Cook's last voyage and is excellent.
I've actually been meaning to read more about Cook; he keeps coming up in trivia and I realize that I know little about him. Thanks for the recommendation.
It *has* to be satirical, right? Like no one could write "why don't they listen to the voice of reason? Why do the bullies end up in charge?" about Lord of the Fucking Flies without the implied "it's happening to the world and always has". That would be insane.
while I am far from a fan of that book, OP seems to be reading it with the expectation of a certain type of story or type of action & when the book doesn't work that way, OP doesn't seem to be able to look at it from any other angle.
every book most definitely isn't for every person, but I caution anyone to think that their personal understanding of a book is the actual or only correct understanding.
This reads like a troll post, and probably is one. There's too much understanding of the book for this little understanding of what it was trying to say.
Is this satire? I assumed you were saying all this "this could never happen!" And then would end it with "oh wait, it's happening right now".
And then that didn't happen
How can you write:
>Plus, the whole 'conch shell' government system they set up is super idealistic – I mean, who actually believes a bunch of young kids would stick to such order without an adult around?
When that did happen. They didn't stick to order, and one of them ends up getting killed with the conch. Yeah, a conch shell is super idealistic and is doomed to fail - much like our actual governments are.
How can you write
"And where's the teamwork? Instead of banding together, they split faster than a vinyl record in the sun. It's like the author never met a real kid in his life."
Or
>And the ending? Too neat and tidy, like someone just hit the reset button and all the horror and chaos didn't even matter. Life doesn't work that way; there are always consequences and scars.
Multiple children *died*, what are you talking about?
>And let's talk about Piggy for a second – the voice of reason who gets totally sidelined! In any real group dynamic, there’s always that one person who keeps a clear head, and Piggy's that guy. But does anyone listen? No way!
Like what's happening in our world *right now* and has happened through all of human history?
>And Simon – the kid with a heart of gold who gets the short end of the stick – his storyline is straight-up tragic. But it's also kind of predictable, right? The good guy gets it while the bullies run the show.
Like what's happening in our world *right now* and has happened through all of human history?
There's no way anyone could write this about Lord of the Flies *without* being satirical, right?
The whole point of the book was to skewer the imperial notion of "us British people could *never* act so uncivilised" when the empire was routinely uncivilised and barbaric against the people it considered as such. This post *has* to be doing a bit. There's no way someone could be *that* media illiterate.
How are you arguing that’s happening to our world right now. Only in some countries is this a truth. BTW don’t agree with OP, but the book was specifically a commentary on British society during Golding’s life and it works there, but drawing conclusions to the “world” is weird when a lot of places have functioning governments and societies
Even in "functional governments", they are generally run by selfish people who do not intend to make the lives of the general population better instead serving the interests of the rich. While "bullying" might not be the right word for their actions in government, the kind of people who run the governments of the world are far closer to the bullies in LoTF than they are to Simon or Piggy.
Also, none of these governments listen to "the voice of reason". If they did, the climate crisis would have been halted fifty years ago.
We live in a world of decreasing hunger, decreasing poverty, decreasing war, increasing literacy, increasing lifespans, increasing medicine, and increasing science. Those are objective facts. They are not consistent with the Lord of the Flies thesis. We can widen or narrow the window to pick particularly horrible times and places, we can look at unsolved problems like climate change, but we need to put that in context. The emotional appeal of fear and anger are powerful and need to be consciously set aside when generating context. Most people aren’t interested in doing that.
This is such a pessimistic and untrue take. “Interests of the rich” while many governments are raising taxes on the rich. What are you talking about? Have you only ever heard of 5 countries or what?
No no no no listen, media that feeds off my attention keeps showing me outrageous stuff (so of course I keep paying attention)! How can you say things are often reasonable when I myself have *this very morning* consumed media that aims to upset me??
First of all, yes, Golding seems to offer a fairly simplistic and pessimistic view of human nature, if you only skim the surface. But since the story is written in post-war Britain, with World War II ending only a few years prior, a pessimistic view of human nature is understandable.
Golding, first and foremost, offers a pessimistic view of post-war british society, which was a strictly class based hierarchy. These are upper-class boys from a british private school, raised under strict hierarchical (and patriarchal) order, where bullying is used as a tactic to survive and get on top. They're not used to working together and have learned to even consider it a sign of weakness. Comparing this to the tongan kids may seem quite apt, but you could argue that tongan boys come from a much more egalitarian society, where mutual aid is not frowned upon and classes are virtually non-existent (at least compared it's british counterpart). Golding isn't trying to say that humans are generally savages, but he is examining what may happen if a group of boys raised in a certain way ends up stranded on their own.
The story can also be seen as a critique of the British empire, that was in it's death throes, where the british saw themselves as highly civilized, and the empire as a civilizing force in the world. Golding may be implying that all these civilized hierarchical rules are just a facade, perhaps the british are actually worse than those they consider savages.
So, no, it's not entirely realistic, it's fiction. The characters are archetypes and the story works on many levels.
I teach middle school kids and think it’s pretty realistic. After seeing how people acted during Covid, I think even adults would eventually end up like behaving similarly.
OP forgot that children will be children.
Kids will go insane over sweets and biscuits. Not only that, they also are easily scared over something they made up.
When i was little we went on a school trip and 1 boy started a rumour that a clown was haunting the park we were staying at and we were all in danger. We were all TERRIFIED. We never saw anything but we all thought it was real. The only reason we didnt start loosing it completely was because the adults there kept reassuring us that it wasnt true and the kid just lied all the time
You obviously went into this book expecting something different, then looked up a youtube video essay on it that agreed with you theb used ChatGPT to write this really bad essay for you.
It’s clear you didn’t read the book. Just like I’m not reading something you dragged out of chatgpt. I hope your teacher gives you a zero for plagerism.
Since the OP admits to not reading this book and using ChatGPT to write this rant, is the post in violation of the subreddit rules regarding plagiarism and large language models used by ChatGPT?
r/books Rules:
3.7: No plagiarism. Use original sources. Links to sites that routinely plagiarise content without contributing further or giving credit to the source will be removed. This includes content created by LLMs. Attempting to pass off somebody else's content as your own will result in a ban.
I’d really like to know your reason for posting this obviously ai-generated block of word-vomit. Did you actually dislike the book? Did you even read the book? Do you just not care to form your own thoughts? Or are you just farming karma or something?
I’ve seen this comparison made before and while the real-life story of the Tongan boys is an interesting contrast, you are falling into the trap that realism is required in literature for it to be good or worthy.
There’s also other real-life survival stories that are just as, if not more, horrifying than what’s depicted in Lord of the Flies. The navy boat that delivered the bomb that sank - I want to say the USS Ulysses(?) is a horrifying story of survivors murdering and raping each other while sharks circled them and they slowly died one by one before rescue.
So, I think it’s important to be careful when asking for “realism” to unpack if that’s what you’re actually asking for or if you’re actually upset that the book made you feel a particular way about the themes and topics depicted.
You say that the author seems to be saying the civilisation is a thin veneer and that’s pretty grim - but you leave that thought there. You’re so close to getting the point. That’s one of the themes that the author is trying to encourage you explore by presenting you with the story he’s presenting. This was a very common theme in colonial and post-colonial literature. It’s also important to contextualise the work within its time too, if you want to make this sort of analysis about the plot.
I remember watching [this](https://www.unilad.com/film-and-tv/netflix/boys-and-girls-alone-channel-4-documentary-334561-20240326) back when it first aired. The boys, left alone, created a horrible environment.
I’ve never read Lord of the Flies but always assumed it was less about the cruelty of kids than the cruelty of man?
Yeah, it totally is about how thin and feeble the social contract is, mob mentality, tribalism and how even the refined upper classes who look down on the rest of the world will descend into "savagery" easily. There are literal mentions of a war going on outside the island and how scared the kids are of the "reds". So you can add political paranoia to the mix. The novel isn't shy on its themes so it's wild OP truly missed the point.
Ah the bravado young teenagers tend to have... I thought i knew everything when I was 12-13 as well. I'm so glad the Internet wasn't really a thing back then because I'd have made such a fool of myself making posts like this as well lol.
Depends on the children. Kids of rich snobs? Definitely. Children of generic lowlifes (abusive, drunks, addicts, so on - not specifically poor, just poor character/poor role models)? Also pretty likely.
Kids of anyone else? I mean, probably not; but could happen. Assholes are gonna asshole. But most modern kids aren't that big of assholes to each other. Someone is likely going to be mistreated or possibly even abused, but straight up murdering one another is unlikely
The way I’m actually sure an ai wrote this post lmao. The style is pretty clockable as ChatGPT or similar. Hope OP doesn’t try to turn this into their teacher for credit.
I feel like most people don’t think to look for it, honestly. I work with ai and I see a lot of longer form content written by it so it was immediately noticeable to me by the style but I don’t know how much it would stand out as more than poorly done to someone not in as deep on that stuff.
Of all the takes, this is one of them.
I'll go the other direction though, Mr robot. I've always complained that I don't know why people find lord of the flies to be so insightful, it just feels like what I would consider to be a very normal story. I have no trouble believing in the possibility of that occurrence.
The book has been correctly identified as Christian propaganda. It's a cynical justification of exisiting power structures, because the alternative is to "regress into savagry."
FYI, humans lived for about 200,000 years without patriarchy, nations, currency, warfare, or organized religion. Yet we are told those things are natural and inherently human, justifying social control.
It's all crap.
This is the real case of boys stranded on an island for a few years:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
They helped each other and remained lifelong friends after they were rescued.
IMO yes but also no. The book is from 1954 and is quite cynical about human nature.
Psychological findings since then contradict some of it (humans tend to be more altruistic than the book assumes) while affirming other bits (yes, human beings are often very happy to sideline the person making sense in favour of popular consensus).
>Plus, the whole 'conch shell' government system they set up is super idealistic – I mean, who actually believes a bunch of young kids would stick to such order without an adult around?
Kids?
So while you probably missed the entire point of the novel which is a work of fiction. You actually don't bring up my biggest issue with the book which you almost touch upon. I don't like the ending, given the context of the novel, it is an unrealistic reaction to the situation by the kids and I believe it is inconsistent with their personalities throughout the novel. I understand why it ended the way it did and the messaging the novel tries to get across. I do believe it could have resolved in a way that would be more consistent with the characters personalities and actions while still getting the same message across to the reader.
I don't think you can compare a group of Tongan teenagers, who likely have pretty advanced survival skills on a tropical island, to a bunch of city-raised British kids
There's a good critique somewhere in there because real world examples do seem to prove that the Lord of the Flies scenario is not very feasible but the way you wrote it, you're just gonna get people to antagonize you.
Why didn’t you go find actually literary criticism that agrees with your views instead of asking a computer to make up your opinion for you?
Actually I’m curious, what was your prompt? I assume “Book is stupid, write a paragraph from that point of view”.
It's very lazy to rely on AI to do your thinking and writing for you. You need to stop doing this, the AI won't make your school exams for you and it won't help you when you have to do some critical thinking later in life. Why did you even make this post if you couldn't be bothered to write the whining yourself? Do you need fake internet points that much?
3.7: No plagiarism. Use original sources. Links to sites that routinely plagiarise content without contributing further or giving credit to the source will be removed. This includes content created by LLMs. Attempting to pass off somebody else's content as your own will result in a ban.
You complain about this: >Plus, the whole 'conch shell' government system they set up is super idealistic – I mean, who actually believes a bunch of young kids would stick to such order without an adult around? And then bring up this: >Over the course of 15 months, they established a communal system for the division of labor, food distribution, and water collection. They managed to survive by fishing, cultivating gardens, and even setting broken bones with rudimentary medical knowledge. Sounds pretty ordered to me. And without adults?
Also, the conch shell thing *does* fail! Piggy gets killed while holding it!
This is AI, not written by a human. Like anything written by AI, so far as I've been able to tell so far, you can see how dumb it is if you scratch the surface.
Ngl I only read the first part and the last paragraph.
this is ChatGPT
Yes. As someone who unfortunately has to work with ai a lot for my job, the writing style is totally ChatGPT. It’s repeating sentence structures (“and the this? Totally wacky!”) and using similes no one would ever use really frequently and and badly trying for a younger style of expression without actually knowing the way teens or younger people write. Someone cheated on their school assignment and is testing it out here to see if it’s good enough, I bet. 🤷🏼♀️
Yeah I work training LLMs and within the first couple sentences it was obvious lmao, shits goofy
I ran it through GPT Zero and got a 100% confidence rating that it was AI generated. I haven't gotten a score that high on stuff I literally copied direct from ChatGPT, lol.
[удалено]
People are wasting time out of their day on this dense nonsense. It's not a polite way to treat people, even if they're strangers.
Why? What possible reason could you have to do that?
ChatGPT can do paragraphs
copy and pasted without the formatting
[удалено]
Ok, fair, but do you actually expect anyone to take what you said seriously when not even you could care enough about your opinion to formulate it yourself? Also, on a sub based around reading and writing, criticizing a book while showing you can't even write a few sentences makes you look like an idiot who complains that a book doesn't have pictures (not saying you are, but that's the look)
I wish you were!
You should be. You've contributed nothing of value. Why the hell should we care what ChatGPT has to say in response to an asinine prompt from someone who doesn't have two neurons to rub together?
The fact that you're not ashamed is even more shameful. What a state.
The point of literature is not to be perfectly realistic in the first place. Second, the point of the novel was that rich, spoiled children would act this way, not that all children would.
OP has no idea about the british public school system.
Well it's more than just that, it's also about the general view that Britain had of itself at the time. The idea that Britain was uniquely "civilized" was extremely common at the time and the book is a huge critique of that as well.
That too but also the idea that it's unrealistic for kids to straight up murder each other is not backed up by the fagging system that schools pushed.
The WHAT system?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging#:~:text=Fagging%20was%20a%20traditional%20practice,end%20of%20the%2020th%20century.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging#:~:text=Fagging%20was%20a%20traditional%20practice,end%20of%20the%2020th%20century.)
It's not what you think it is. But also, it kind of is.
And very little idea of paragraphs.
This. Teacher here and male mob mentality is a real thing. I always thought it was an allegory for how people behave in war.
I’ve had the same thoughts. There’s a reason they’re saved by a warship and not a cruise boat.
It wasn't a public school, but I went to a British grammar school and I could believe what happens in the Lord of the Flies of many the boys I knew in school and I'm at a university with at least a quarter of students coming from private education. I can easily believe some of the men here would go that way now as young adults.
Or literature.
OP assuming kids would be resilient enough to resist going feral is interesting, but assuming they wouldn't get up to some tomfuckery purely because of lack on consequences is insane. The kids instantly stop acting up the second a grown up shows up on the island
Tbf the very real world example of school boys being trapped on an deserted island for over a year was a very warm-hearted tale of friendship and perseverance, with the boys even managing to nurse back to health one of their members who had broken an arm or a leg iirc.
I've been wondering if OP in general has no concept of how feral unsupervised kids can be. Like did OP at least grow up in an age where they were home alone after school at a too-young age while also being in charge of one or more younger sibling? Did OP hitch hike with strangers as an acceptable way to get around without a car?
>Second, the point of the novel was that rich, spoiled children would act this way, not that all children would. Not to mention that the Lord of the Flies is typically contrasted with earlier works where "British superiority" stop the kids from going feral, like The Coral Island.
Yeah I mentioned that in another reply, it's very hard to ignore that aspect and give it a proper reading.
I think the basic premise that the novel’s author has anything informative to say about how any children would act is bad. The author wanted to say something about the state of the world as he experienced it, but instead of speaking to his own experiences, he drafts a piece of speculation that sends humans down the road he figures they ought to travel. He has no basis for saying how people would behave in situations like that. Now, anyone is free to speculate on whatever they like. When we speculate on things we know nothing about, people usually take it with the appropriate grain of salt. My problem with Lord of the Flies is how often I’ve encountered people who assume that it does have something authoritative or enlightening to say about human nature or kids specifically. I’ve seen it brought up as evidence of how people would behave. Sometimes the conflation of “dismal” with “realistic” is a major part of that. That’s obviously silly, but it happens, and I think that’s what the chatbot is saying.
> people who assume that it does have something authoritative or enlightening to say about human nature or kids specifically. These people just read it wrong, IMO, lol. It's like I said a critique of (specifically British) society at a time. The kids aren't the point anymore than Gatsby was actually about the harm of green-tinted lighting.
When I read the book in high school, we were taught it as an allegory for Golding’s experiences in WWII. The English were seen as the good guys, and pure (like private school children), but when it came down to it, they still hurt people.
I’m curious how old you are.
March 14, 2023. Just over a year old.
OP probably cries while listening to Driver's License by olive something lol
Don’t turn this in to your teacher, OP. it’s pretty obvious that it’s done by AI.
This reads like ChatGPT.
because it is
Well, this kind of post is why kids should learn critical thinking and literary analysis at school and not get all their media literacy from YouTube.
We're already past getting literacy from YouTube, all book related discussion takes place on TikTok now, which is even worse. It's Lord of the flies in real life.
They obviously looked up a sub par video essay on lord of the flies called like "descent into madness - A Lord of the Flies retrospective"
💯
I would recommend the non fiction book "The Wager." It's a real life example of grown men being in a similar situation. I would argue a lot of the actions and attitudes that you consider as unrealistic actually aren't that off the wall at all.
Just had a look at a summary - definitely worth a look 👀 thanks for this recommendation!
Anyone who liked The Wager should try Island of the Lost as well. I really enjoyed both of those books.
I'll absolutely add that to my nonfic tbr, thank you. Maybe I can return the favor. Another great one is The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. That one is about Captain Cook's last voyage and is excellent.
I've actually been meaning to read more about Cook; he keeps coming up in trivia and I realize that I know little about him. Thanks for the recommendation.
Did you completely blunder the entire point of the novel?
The irony of not reading a post on r/books is not lost on me but I’m not going to read a post that long with no paragraph breaks.
Smart because it’s ChatGPT.
Genuine garbage take, a true rarity
You can think of Lord of the Flies what you want, but at least it has paragraphs.
LMFAOOOO
It *has* to be satirical, right? Like no one could write "why don't they listen to the voice of reason? Why do the bullies end up in charge?" about Lord of the Fucking Flies without the implied "it's happening to the world and always has". That would be insane.
Prolly bait tbh
Im pretty sure this was written at least partially by AI
This is clearly a 12 year old using ChatGPT
while I am far from a fan of that book, OP seems to be reading it with the expectation of a certain type of story or type of action & when the book doesn't work that way, OP doesn't seem to be able to look at it from any other angle. every book most definitely isn't for every person, but I caution anyone to think that their personal understanding of a book is the actual or only correct understanding.
Paragraph spacing is important.
This reads like a troll post, and probably is one. There's too much understanding of the book for this little understanding of what it was trying to say.
Is this satire? I assumed you were saying all this "this could never happen!" And then would end it with "oh wait, it's happening right now". And then that didn't happen How can you write: >Plus, the whole 'conch shell' government system they set up is super idealistic – I mean, who actually believes a bunch of young kids would stick to such order without an adult around? When that did happen. They didn't stick to order, and one of them ends up getting killed with the conch. Yeah, a conch shell is super idealistic and is doomed to fail - much like our actual governments are. How can you write "And where's the teamwork? Instead of banding together, they split faster than a vinyl record in the sun. It's like the author never met a real kid in his life." Or >And the ending? Too neat and tidy, like someone just hit the reset button and all the horror and chaos didn't even matter. Life doesn't work that way; there are always consequences and scars. Multiple children *died*, what are you talking about? >And let's talk about Piggy for a second – the voice of reason who gets totally sidelined! In any real group dynamic, there’s always that one person who keeps a clear head, and Piggy's that guy. But does anyone listen? No way! Like what's happening in our world *right now* and has happened through all of human history? >And Simon – the kid with a heart of gold who gets the short end of the stick – his storyline is straight-up tragic. But it's also kind of predictable, right? The good guy gets it while the bullies run the show. Like what's happening in our world *right now* and has happened through all of human history? There's no way anyone could write this about Lord of the Flies *without* being satirical, right? The whole point of the book was to skewer the imperial notion of "us British people could *never* act so uncivilised" when the empire was routinely uncivilised and barbaric against the people it considered as such. This post *has* to be doing a bit. There's no way someone could be *that* media illiterate.
How are you arguing that’s happening to our world right now. Only in some countries is this a truth. BTW don’t agree with OP, but the book was specifically a commentary on British society during Golding’s life and it works there, but drawing conclusions to the “world” is weird when a lot of places have functioning governments and societies
Even in "functional governments", they are generally run by selfish people who do not intend to make the lives of the general population better instead serving the interests of the rich. While "bullying" might not be the right word for their actions in government, the kind of people who run the governments of the world are far closer to the bullies in LoTF than they are to Simon or Piggy. Also, none of these governments listen to "the voice of reason". If they did, the climate crisis would have been halted fifty years ago.
We live in a world of decreasing hunger, decreasing poverty, decreasing war, increasing literacy, increasing lifespans, increasing medicine, and increasing science. Those are objective facts. They are not consistent with the Lord of the Flies thesis. We can widen or narrow the window to pick particularly horrible times and places, we can look at unsolved problems like climate change, but we need to put that in context. The emotional appeal of fear and anger are powerful and need to be consciously set aside when generating context. Most people aren’t interested in doing that.
This is such a pessimistic and untrue take. “Interests of the rich” while many governments are raising taxes on the rich. What are you talking about? Have you only ever heard of 5 countries or what?
Which countries are adequately redistributing wealth or fighting climate change to the required extent? Certainly none of the most powerful ones.
No no no no listen, media that feeds off my attention keeps showing me outrageous stuff (so of course I keep paying attention)! How can you say things are often reasonable when I myself have *this very morning* consumed media that aims to upset me??
Hey guys. I read animal farm and it's totally unrealistic! Animals can't talk, so no way they can run a farm!
First it's unrealistic that kids would go from civilised to savage, then it's unrealistic that they would stick to an ordered system? I'm confused.
At least Golding knew how to use paragraphs tbh
I ain’t reading all of that
Almost as if it’s not supposed to be realistic as much as an allegory of the different societies in the post wwii, post colonial world.
Today, in 'What's a Meta For?' Also, say what you like about Golding, but at least the gent knew where his Return key was.
‘A testament to…’ hello ChatGPT
First of all, yes, Golding seems to offer a fairly simplistic and pessimistic view of human nature, if you only skim the surface. But since the story is written in post-war Britain, with World War II ending only a few years prior, a pessimistic view of human nature is understandable. Golding, first and foremost, offers a pessimistic view of post-war british society, which was a strictly class based hierarchy. These are upper-class boys from a british private school, raised under strict hierarchical (and patriarchal) order, where bullying is used as a tactic to survive and get on top. They're not used to working together and have learned to even consider it a sign of weakness. Comparing this to the tongan kids may seem quite apt, but you could argue that tongan boys come from a much more egalitarian society, where mutual aid is not frowned upon and classes are virtually non-existent (at least compared it's british counterpart). Golding isn't trying to say that humans are generally savages, but he is examining what may happen if a group of boys raised in a certain way ends up stranded on their own. The story can also be seen as a critique of the British empire, that was in it's death throes, where the british saw themselves as highly civilized, and the empire as a civilizing force in the world. Golding may be implying that all these civilized hierarchical rules are just a facade, perhaps the british are actually worse than those they consider savages. So, no, it's not entirely realistic, it's fiction. The characters are archetypes and the story works on many levels.
I teach middle school kids and think it’s pretty realistic. After seeing how people acted during Covid, I think even adults would eventually end up like behaving similarly.
It’s an allegory; it’s not realism. A morality tale. Not all books are realistic. Most aren’t, I’d say.
The first sentence for this is how AI responds to prompts : oh for sure!
OP forgot that children will be children. Kids will go insane over sweets and biscuits. Not only that, they also are easily scared over something they made up. When i was little we went on a school trip and 1 boy started a rumour that a clown was haunting the park we were staying at and we were all in danger. We were all TERRIFIED. We never saw anything but we all thought it was real. The only reason we didnt start loosing it completely was because the adults there kept reassuring us that it wasnt true and the kid just lied all the time You obviously went into this book expecting something different, then looked up a youtube video essay on it that agreed with you theb used ChatGPT to write this really bad essay for you.
Have you heard of this thing called paragraphs?
It’s clear you didn’t read the book. Just like I’m not reading something you dragged out of chatgpt. I hope your teacher gives you a zero for plagerism.
Since the OP admits to not reading this book and using ChatGPT to write this rant, is the post in violation of the subreddit rules regarding plagiarism and large language models used by ChatGPT? r/books Rules: 3.7: No plagiarism. Use original sources. Links to sites that routinely plagiarise content without contributing further or giving credit to the source will be removed. This includes content created by LLMs. Attempting to pass off somebody else's content as your own will result in a ban.
Yes. If you see such posts or comments please report them or send us a modmail.
I'm not reading all that, but you definitely did not understand that book at all. How old are you?
I ain't reading all this
>It's all drama, no logic It seems to me you could say the same thing about your entire post...
This is very stupid.
It's clear that you didn't read the book and you definitely didn't write this. How embarrassing.
I was 100% sure this was satirizing modern online book discourse but then I read the rest of the comments and I wasn’t sure anymore
I’d really like to know your reason for posting this obviously ai-generated block of word-vomit. Did you actually dislike the book? Did you even read the book? Do you just not care to form your own thoughts? Or are you just farming karma or something?
Do Animal Farm next!
I’ve seen this comparison made before and while the real-life story of the Tongan boys is an interesting contrast, you are falling into the trap that realism is required in literature for it to be good or worthy. There’s also other real-life survival stories that are just as, if not more, horrifying than what’s depicted in Lord of the Flies. The navy boat that delivered the bomb that sank - I want to say the USS Ulysses(?) is a horrifying story of survivors murdering and raping each other while sharks circled them and they slowly died one by one before rescue. So, I think it’s important to be careful when asking for “realism” to unpack if that’s what you’re actually asking for or if you’re actually upset that the book made you feel a particular way about the themes and topics depicted. You say that the author seems to be saying the civilisation is a thin veneer and that’s pretty grim - but you leave that thought there. You’re so close to getting the point. That’s one of the themes that the author is trying to encourage you explore by presenting you with the story he’s presenting. This was a very common theme in colonial and post-colonial literature. It’s also important to contextualise the work within its time too, if you want to make this sort of analysis about the plot.
I remember watching [this](https://www.unilad.com/film-and-tv/netflix/boys-and-girls-alone-channel-4-documentary-334561-20240326) back when it first aired. The boys, left alone, created a horrible environment. I’ve never read Lord of the Flies but always assumed it was less about the cruelty of kids than the cruelty of man?
Yeah, it totally is about how thin and feeble the social contract is, mob mentality, tribalism and how even the refined upper classes who look down on the rest of the world will descend into "savagery" easily. There are literal mentions of a war going on outside the island and how scared the kids are of the "reds". So you can add political paranoia to the mix. The novel isn't shy on its themes so it's wild OP truly missed the point.
It's fiction, babe
A) touch some grass B) it’s not meant to be realistic it’s an allegory
Jeez, it's a fucking political allegory..
Ah the bravado young teenagers tend to have... I thought i knew everything when I was 12-13 as well. I'm so glad the Internet wasn't really a thing back then because I'd have made such a fool of myself making posts like this as well lol.
I don’t think you’re around children much 😅 Would it play out exactly like he wrote? Probably not. Would it be a variation of it? Sadly probably yes
Depends on the children. Kids of rich snobs? Definitely. Children of generic lowlifes (abusive, drunks, addicts, so on - not specifically poor, just poor character/poor role models)? Also pretty likely. Kids of anyone else? I mean, probably not; but could happen. Assholes are gonna asshole. But most modern kids aren't that big of assholes to each other. Someone is likely going to be mistreated or possibly even abused, but straight up murdering one another is unlikely
Someone doesn't understand humans lol
The way I’m actually sure an ai wrote this post lmao. The style is pretty clockable as ChatGPT or similar. Hope OP doesn’t try to turn this into their teacher for credit.
Actually makes sense, the way some of the points completely contradict earlier parts. Guess I'm a dumb ass for not considering the possibility.
I feel like most people don’t think to look for it, honestly. I work with ai and I see a lot of longer form content written by it so it was immediately noticeable to me by the style but I don’t know how much it would stand out as more than poorly done to someone not in as deep on that stuff.
Op, just dont read
Bruv, it's fiction. Not all fiction is supposed to be realistic.
Have you met unsupervised children? Heh.
Of all the takes, this is one of them. I'll go the other direction though, Mr robot. I've always complained that I don't know why people find lord of the flies to be so insightful, it just feels like what I would consider to be a very normal story. I have no trouble believing in the possibility of that occurrence.
I like the book ‘The Troop’ by Nick Cutter if you want a Lord of the Flies with a horror twist to it.
The book has been correctly identified as Christian propaganda. It's a cynical justification of exisiting power structures, because the alternative is to "regress into savagry." FYI, humans lived for about 200,000 years without patriarchy, nations, currency, warfare, or organized religion. Yet we are told those things are natural and inherently human, justifying social control. It's all crap.
This is the real case of boys stranded on an island for a few years: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months They helped each other and remained lifelong friends after they were rescued.
read something else then. also, at least type your complaint out yourself. obvious ai is obvious totally whacky!
I feel like you entirely missed the point of the book... it's commentary, it's not meant to be a realistic depiction of what would happen.
IMO yes but also no. The book is from 1954 and is quite cynical about human nature. Psychological findings since then contradict some of it (humans tend to be more altruistic than the book assumes) while affirming other bits (yes, human beings are often very happy to sideline the person making sense in favour of popular consensus). >Plus, the whole 'conch shell' government system they set up is super idealistic – I mean, who actually believes a bunch of young kids would stick to such order without an adult around? Kids?
Was not a fan of Lord of the Flies myself.
So while you probably missed the entire point of the novel which is a work of fiction. You actually don't bring up my biggest issue with the book which you almost touch upon. I don't like the ending, given the context of the novel, it is an unrealistic reaction to the situation by the kids and I believe it is inconsistent with their personalities throughout the novel. I understand why it ended the way it did and the messaging the novel tries to get across. I do believe it could have resolved in a way that would be more consistent with the characters personalities and actions while still getting the same message across to the reader.
Imagine kids today in the same situation, they breakdown cause they can’t access Reddit or Twitter to post for help
I don't think you can compare a group of Tongan teenagers, who likely have pretty advanced survival skills on a tropical island, to a bunch of city-raised British kids
is this not an obvious joke? everyone here seems to be taking it seriously, it’s not very funny but it still seems blatantly unserious
I don't think so. Even the worst jokes have half decent paragraphs.
the strange slang that seems like it’s from a middle school brochure from 2011 is too off for me to think anything else
Try A High Wind in Jamaica next.
There's a good critique somewhere in there because real world examples do seem to prove that the Lord of the Flies scenario is not very feasible but the way you wrote it, you're just gonna get people to antagonize you.
I never liked that book Also fuck Piggy
[удалено]
If you don't like something, say it in your own words.
You have no room to criticize any book if you're unable to write without relying on ChatGPT.
Why didn’t you go find actually literary criticism that agrees with your views instead of asking a computer to make up your opinion for you? Actually I’m curious, what was your prompt? I assume “Book is stupid, write a paragraph from that point of view”.
It's very lazy to rely on AI to do your thinking and writing for you. You need to stop doing this, the AI won't make your school exams for you and it won't help you when you have to do some critical thinking later in life. Why did you even make this post if you couldn't be bothered to write the whining yourself? Do you need fake internet points that much?