Jack Merridew

933 Words4 Pages
In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, there are a handful of stranded English boys trapped on an island. Among these boys, there is an important main character named Jack Merridew. Jack is a twelve year old English boy, and the main antagonist in the story, to the protagonist and Chief of the stranded island boys, Ralph. Between the two boys, they both want to be chief of the large group of young boys, but Ralph gets all of the votes, leaving Jack biting the dust. Jack strongly believes he should have been picked as the chief of the boys, but Ralph assigns Jack the task of leading Jack’s choir, and turning the choir kids into hunters. To start off the book, Jack seems like an okay co-leader, and is still a civilized English…show more content…
After a couple of failed attempts, Merridew realizes that maybe the wild boars keep running away because he stands out so much, and they keep spotting him. “They see me, I think” he says: Something pink under the trees.” So, Jack gets the idea to try and camouflage himself, in hopes of so the beasts wouldn’t spot him so quickly. Making his own war paint, he smears some all over his face, and instantly feels the physical and mental changes overcoming himself. The paint turns out to be way more than just camouflage. Not only changing what he looked like on the outside, the paint also changes what Jack feels on the inside. “The mask was a thing of its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness”. The paint is what turns Jack into a savage, as the book describes his group of boys later on in the book. Later on, Jack then calls his boys and puts his theory to test. The hunters do successfully slaughter a sow (female pig), but at a cost. The choirs job assigned by Chief Ralph was to keep the signal fire going up on the mountaintop, in hopes that a rescue boat would see the fire and come save them. By going hunting, they let the fire go out, and a boat passing by never saw them on the island. While the boys are excited they killed their first pig, Ralph is highly upset with Jack and the boys for not being able to perform their one simple task.…show more content…
But, this still wasn’t enough for him. To let his group of hunters have a feast whenever they wanted to, they needed a fire, and they couldn’t make a fire without one of the main characters glasses, whose name (or nickname) was Piggy. This led to more confrontation, because Jack led a small group of boys over to Ralph’s campsite to go and steal Piggy’s glasses. The boys beat up the remaining defenders of Piggy’s glasses, and Jack’s pack came back to their campsite successful, able to make a fire whenever the sun was up. Ralph still wants to be diplomatic about all of this, and go and talk things out. Piggy wants to do the same, and suggests he go and talk to them with the conch (the conch is a symbol of law and order, and when blown, the boys would go silent and listen to who was
Open Document