Lord Of the Flies Religion Notes
Piggy
Character Analysis
So, Piggy is kind of the social outcast of the group. What’s more, he’s going to get smashed to an untimely and tragic death by a large rock.
But let’s talk about this rock-related injury. We were rather intrigued by the line that said, in Roger’s eyes, Piggy just looked like a “bag of fat.” This sounded familiar, so we went back a few chapters and found that the pigs were referred to as “bags of fat” as well. Then we sat around and thought about how Piggy’s name is PIGGY, and about how the boys went gradually from killing PIGS to killing PIGGY. Then we abused the use of capital letters to get our point across.
It seems the boys start to see Piggy as just another animal, and he is therefore killed as though that’s just what he is. The interesting thing is that the boys, because they kill Piggy, sort of become animals themselves. It’s a slippery, slidey, downward slope of atrocity. But animals aside, there’s another key point in Piggy’s death, and that is that the conch dies with him. The conch is smashed into thousands of pieces, which is about as close as an inanimate object is going to come to dying at all.
So what was it about Piggy and his relationship with the conch that warranted their duo death? To answer this question, we have to go back to the beginning of the novel, where Piggy, a.k.a. the “fat boy,” was discovering the conch along with Ralph. While Ralph finds the conch, Piggy is the one to identify it and tell Ralph how to use it. He then becomes the conch’s staunchest defender, always insisting on rules and order. He’s the character who makes such a big deal about learning names; he sees each boy as a fellow human being, and wants to give him the right and privilege of being called by his proper name. The sad part is that Piggy is the only one denied this privilege (except the twins, but more about that later). Having names is an important part of the system of order that Piggy defends. Even in the moments before
Character Analysis
So, Piggy is kind of the social outcast of the group. What’s more, he’s going to get smashed to an untimely and tragic death by a large rock.
But let’s talk about this rock-related injury. We were rather intrigued by the line that said, in Roger’s eyes, Piggy just looked like a “bag of fat.” This sounded familiar, so we went back a few chapters and found that the pigs were referred to as “bags of fat” as well. Then we sat around and thought about how Piggy’s name is PIGGY, and about how the boys went gradually from killing PIGS to killing PIGGY. Then we abused the use of capital letters to get our point across.
It seems the boys start to see Piggy as just another animal, and he is therefore killed as though that’s just what he is. The interesting thing is that the boys, because they kill Piggy, sort of become animals themselves. It’s a slippery, slidey, downward slope of atrocity. But animals aside, there’s another key point in Piggy’s death, and that is that the conch dies with him. The conch is smashed into thousands of pieces, which is about as close as an inanimate object is going to come to dying at all.
So what was it about Piggy and his relationship with the conch that warranted their duo death? To answer this question, we have to go back to the beginning of the novel, where Piggy, a.k.a. the “fat boy,” was discovering the conch along with Ralph. While Ralph finds the conch, Piggy is the one to identify it and tell Ralph how to use it. He then becomes the conch’s staunchest defender, always insisting on rules and order. He’s the character who makes such a big deal about learning names; he sees each boy as a fellow human being, and wants to give him the right and privilege of being called by his proper name. The sad part is that Piggy is the only one denied this privilege (except the twins, but more about that later). Having names is an important part of the system of order that Piggy defends. Even in the moments before