Essay on Lord of the Flies-Piggy

“Sucks To Your Ass-mar!” The conch, glasses, and brains are all symbols in Lord of the Flies by William Golding. In this novel, a group of school kids crash into a deserted island and fight wilderness, fear, and themselves to survive. Piggy, being one of the most vital characters in their survival, is often disrespected and overlooked. This is persistent throughout the novel, and can be attributed to his weight and nerdy appearance. Generally, Piggy means well, and tries to help the boy’s survival on the island. Piggy, an extremely complex and intelligent character, contributes to the boy’s survival by using logic and brains. Piggy, along with being the brains of the island, is also a very complex and misunderstood boy. “Piggy is a much more complex character, than the simplistic interpretations so regularly adduced will allow”. (Reilly. online). This states that Piggy was an extremely complicated character, and is often overlooked by not only characters in the book, such as Jack and Ralph, but also by readers. He is also described as a brainiac by Golding himself, “Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains”. (Golding 71). This emphasizes to the reader that Piggy’s brain is being discounted due to his stature, and this causes readers to discount his intelligence, however, it brings the reader’s attention to them being naive. This last quote also reinforces the concept that his body is causing his smarts to be overlooked “Piggy lacks the looks but has the know-how. The trouble is that he knows but cannot do and is relegated”. (Reilly. Online). Lorenz 2

Broken down, this shows that Piggy is a resource that the boys need to utilize, but fail to, and instead they treat him like a set-back, only because he is weak. He has a lot more to offer than just physical labor, and should be honed for using his brain to problem solve, or be inventive. It is quite obvious he was often bullied for his weight at school, due to the fact that kids

Cited: Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Ed. William Golding. New York: Coward-McCann, 1962. Print. Kinead-Weekes, Mark, and Ian Gregor. Modern Critical Interpretation. Ed. Harold Bloom. Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, 1999. Print. Reilly, Patrick. "Lord of the Flies: Beelzebub’s Boys." Infotrac.Galegroup.com. Literature Resource Center, 1990. Web. 13 Feb. 2013. Reilly, Patrick. Lord of the Flies: Fathers and Sons. Ed. Robert Lecker. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print.