Jack And Ralph's Goals In Lord Of The Flies

728 Words3 Pages
Written by William Golding, Lord of the Flies displays the different desires and goals of Jack and Ralph as colliding into a feud in which they argue what tasks are more important. In Chapter Three, when the chief and hunter discuss of their plans, Jack focuses too much on hunting while Ralph aims his attention towards building shelters and keeping the fire lit (50-54). As the antagonist carries out the hunting plans, the fair boy gets enraged (54). He indignantly cries, “I was talking about smoke! Don’t you want to be rescued? All you can talk about is pig, pig, pig!” and “ [...] I work all day with nothing but Simon and you come back and don’t even notice the huts” (54). These quotations show the weakening in Ralph’s state of being the commander, in which none of the boys pay no attention to their duties…show more content…
When the leader reaches the mountain’s top to check if the signal fire is currently ignited, he disappointedly finds a dead fire with “a pile of unused fuel [laying] ready”, and the ship is already gone (68). The protagonist shows his frustration and blame towards Jack and his hunters when he outright states, “They let the bloody fire go out” (68). As the chief and older boys stand on the mountain’s cliff, the hunters return with a chant, holding a slaughtered pig’s head on a stake as a way to finally show their victory (68-69). When the savage boy realizes that they saw smoke from a ship, he grows uneasy from the committed mistake but uses the excuse that they needed all of the boys to kill the pig (69-70). Golding describes the two contrasting personalities by writing, “There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common sense” (71). The author reveals that the mature boy’s intelligent ideas gets interrupted when Jack attempts to steal his position of
Open Document