Author: Scott Aitken

When one reads and finishes Lord of the Flies, a bitter taste is left in the mouth when the characters Piggy and Simon die. The bitter taste isn’t from how they died, but rather that they died in the first place.

For those unfamiliar, the novel is about a group of boys that are stranded on a deserted island after their plane crashes on to the island. In the beginning, a kind but naive boy named Ralph  leads the group of about 20-30 boys, however over a time a sinister and sadistic boy named Jack starts to usurp power from Ralph. By the end of novel, he essentially turned a group of choir boys into savages, aside from Ralph.

The way Jack went about doing this was through his tribal ritualistic cult of the “hunt”, where he would savagely hunt and kill hogs as a sport. The hunts would usually spark a frenzy of sorts among the boys, and slowly but surely the darkness in their hearts started to manifest under the tutelage of Jack. Eventually, from his hunts, Jack gains control and becomes Chief of his tribe, where he sadistically bullies Piggy, with Piggy eventually being killed when someone drops a boulder on his head for talking. Simon is mistaken for the “beast”, which was a dead parachutist in a tree that was mistaken for a monster. Simon is killed by the ravenous tribe by the error.

Shortly before his death however, Simon encountered a sows head impaled on a spear, and went into a trance like state where he spoke with it. The Sows head said that Simon would never escape him, because he is in everyone’s heart. The Sow’s head has been widely considered the devil, as the Lord of the Flies translates from Beelzebub, who was the devil. Furthermore, the “beast” has been construed as being a metaphor for the fear and hatred within human hearts.

The Lord of the flies was published around 1954, and served on an interdisciplinary as being a multi cultural piece. The book focuses heavily on the inaction of the other boys, where they allowed Jack to rise to power, brainwash them into being savages, and started a tribalistic society. Following the deaths of Piggy and Simon, the novel itself has been compared to the events of World War II, how Hitler rose to power, and the horrible things he did while in power. Considering that the book was in 1954, and the nature of the story, it certainly seems like Sir William Golding (who also served in World War II and taught Philosophy) was making a statement on the human errors that occurred in the 20th century.

While blog posts tend to revolve around experiences within texts concerning intertextuality, I would like to discuss a rather terrifying moment in my life where I saw a man’s own take of what it meant to connect two different disciplines into his line of work. A few weeks ago, I chipped my two front teeth, and had to get it bonded by a dentist. I went to a dentist somewhere in Geneseo (won’t say who), and after a few words were exchanged about my insurance and the estimate for how much it would cost to fix my teeth, he took me by the chin and lifted my eyes to meet his, and he said: “Scott, dentistry is the marriage of art and science. I am the artist, and your teeth are my canvas. This drill is my brush, and these drill bits are my pallet. However, the only color I will be using is red, as gums tend to get bloody during this”.

While it was one of the more poetic explanations of how a job encompasses multiple disciplines, the way he described it was rather terrifying to say the least. I decided to write about the experience for one of my other classes, a creative writing class. I wrote about this dentist, and every detail down to what his kids looked like in a picture he had of them on a wall in the back left corner. As I wrote about this dentist, however, it had me thinking of the writing processes of Cane, Everett, and Walker. Did they experience traumatic or interesting experiences that led them to certain character sketches within their fiction? Looking back through Cane’s autobiography, quite a few of the characters he meant in real life were transcribed into his writing in certain ways.

Following this line of thinking, the creative writing class also had me write a piece of literary fiction, and in the piece I wrote, I pretty much gave the main character qualities that I possessed, down to the way he talked, acted, joked around, and even looked. While this may be an extreme example to use, I found it easier to write about myself rather than something completely made up out of thin air. While not every author would go to such lengths, it makes me think about what qualities authors such as Walker, Cane, and Everett give to their characters that they themselves have.

Perhaps even more interesting to try to envision is what qualities that Everett gave to his character, Alice. Did he give Alice qualities of himself, an African American Male writing in the 1990’s, or that of another woman in his life? It could even be said that the Alice in his story was much like Meridian Hill in Alice Walker’s story, perhaps making a homage to Alice Walker, with his character, Alice Achitophel. All of these questions popped up in my mind with ease, and it wouldn’t have been possible without a dentist’s startling depiction of marriage of the disciples. By writing about him and his odd tendencies, it opened a door to new questions to the authors that we have studied that I honestly never thought I would have before.