Read the essay “Why Boys Become Vicious” and answer the prompts below in complete paragraphs.
1. Golding argues that the conditions of chaos and fear create cruelty. Using chapters 6 and above, provide 3 specific examples of an instance of chaos and/or fear in the novel. Explain how each leads to cruelty on the island.
( /5T /5C) 125-150 words
2. Golding argues “When people are afraid they discover the violence within them, and when they are afraid together, they discover that violence within them can be almost bottomless.” Explain how Golding convinces the reader of his argument by providing and explaining i) an example from the article, ii) an example from the text, that you haven’t previously used above, and by providing iii) an example from present day society. ( /5 A /5C) 200-250 words
3. Golding conveys an important message through his essay. Identify, explain, and analyze how language (diction), tone, and imagery help relay the author’s message. (/6 T /5C) 250-350 words
Rough Notes:
Message? -
Language Imagery Tone
4. Explain how Golding’s article helps you understand the term allegory, and explain how the novel is not only an allegory for the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, but an allegory of modern day society. That is, how does he use the establishment of a community on the island and its collapse typical of the larger world we live in?
( /5T /5C) 125-150 words
5. At the back of the text are a number of critical essays about the novel. In particular, pgs. 217, 232, 238, 246 and 265.
Select ONE essay to read. Then explain in an expository paragraph, how the essay provides you with additional insight into the novel. This paragraph can be personal in nature. You should include references to the essay in your reflection, and then respond to the specific points (at least 2) that you have selected. ( /5 A /5C) 150-200 words
Read Twain’s essay “Advice to Youth.” Answer the prompts below:
1. Twain was clearly expressing his views in a much more simple historical time period. What specific evidence is there in his speech that the 19 th century was a different place socially and culturally than the 20 th century? ( /3T)
2. Using the same process as outlined in question #3 above, identify, explain, and analyze how language (diction), tone, imagery, and/or other figurative language convey Twain’s central message about violence. None of your rough work will be collected, but it is a starting point to help you answer the question accurately using specific examples.
(/3 T /5C) 150-200 words

“Why Boys Become Vicious”
by William Golding – 1911-1993 (wrote this the year he died)
*special to The (San Francisco) Examiner 2.28.93*
Pick any of the great saints or moral leaders of Western civilization – Jesus, St. Francis,
Mother Teresa – and the characteristic that stands out is their simplicity.
If it is true, as it seems to be, that there is a simplicity about human goodness, then it is just as true that there is a corresponding complexity about human evil.
Hitler, Stalin and Idi Amin – to name just a few in the 20 th century catalog of evil – were far from being simple men. At times they were childish, at times mad, at times pathetic. But their deeds were the twisted deeds of tangled and contorted souls.
So there is nothing the slightest bit simple about what happened to 2-year old James Bulger after he was led out of a Liverpool area shopping center by two older boys.
We are told that he was beaten and then dumped in the path of a train so that his injuries would be disguised. To contemplate that deed, as we must if we are to live in the real world and not little worlds of our own making, is to face a peculiarly stark form of horror. And the cruelty behind it is nothing if not complex.
It was nearly 40 years ago when I wrote about the cruelty boys can inflict on each other in Lord of the
Flies. It was, of course, not the first time that I had thought about human cruelty and its various manifestations. Since then, too, I have had plenty of reason and opportunity to think about it more.
Are men and women born with cruelty as a deep component of their nature? Is civilization largely a heroic struggle to build layer upon layer of varnish upon the rough and splintered raw material of humankind?
Or does it make a truer picture if we imagine the newborn child as a blank slate upon which the harshness of experience soon prints its indelible and frightening patterns?
I believe all attempts to answer these great questions are doomed to end in doubt and confusion. I leave them to psychologists and prophets. I can only speak as a man who has lived long.
But there are certain things about cruelty – and especially the cruelty of boys – which I believe may be true and from which we can learn: though I also believe in the end we can never completely banish the kind of concentrated horror that has brought to us in the story of James Bulger.
There are, for instance, conditions in which cruelty seems to flourish, which is different from saying that it has clear causes. What are these conditions? Chaos is one, fear is another.
In Russia after the First World War, there were, I believe, gangs of children who had lost their parents. Dispossessed, without anywhere to live or anything to live on, they roamed the country attacking and killing out of sheer cruelty.
There was, at that time, social chaos in many countries, and, left to themselves, these children found a kind of elemental cohesion in their viciousness.
We are told that in some parts of Britain today there are new gangs of children – offspring of an underclass that seems to reject conventional parenting. Without the support of mothers and fathers such children have nothing but the fruits of what they can beg and steal.
It would not surprise me if in these conditions, where the orders and patterns of society cease to matter, gangs begin to find cohesion merely in the joint fulfillment of their darkest instincts.
Add to this heady cocktail the other element – fear – and you get a mixture that is more than doubly terrifying. When people are afraid they discover the violence within them and when they are afraid together they discover that the violence within them can be almost bottomless.
I do not think it is too unlikely to suppose that children living without adult protection are often frightened. Add to that the sudden fear or capture or prosecution – or simple fear of what they had unthinkingly done – and one can see how horrors come about.
Is it also true that the capacity of the young male to maim and torture is somehow connected to his longforgotten beginning as a hunter and killer – a beginning that is very different from the female’s hearth?
The truth must be that both components are of equal importance. We are born with evil in us and cruelty is part of this. (Though there is also a capacity for selflessness and love: otherwise we are denying part of our human nature.)
But what must be true is that we can be twisted and distorted beyond recognition by the guidance – or lack of it – that we absorb directly from our families.

If there is no one around to guide children, then they go wrong. The people who guide children are their fathers and mothers. Children need both and in the later part of this century they often have neither.
And when children go wrong they can often go wrong with a vengeance. There is such energy in children; they are more powerful than any bomb.
Many modern childhoods must be sheer horror, though I do not believe this is necessarily anything new
– history has been full of horror and children have always suffered their share of it.
It parents are absent, if fathers do not provide strength and mothers do not provide love, then children will plumb the depths of their nature.
Old men perhaps are hard to surprise. If this is what happened in the case of the killers or James Bulger we should not be surprised. But we can be shocked into recognizing evil when we see it. The poor child’s pains are over. God help us all.
 British author William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. His first novel, “Lord of the
Flies,” was an international bestseller, and was adapted twice into motion pictures. His latest novel,
“Fire Down Below” (the concluding volume in his sea trilogy) was published by Farrar, Straus & Gould in 1989.

Being told I would be expected to talk here, I inquired what sort of talk I ought to make.
They said it should be something suitable to youth-something didactic, instructive, or something in the nature of good advice. Very well. I have a few things in my mind which I have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one’s tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring and most valuable. First, then. I will say to you my young friends -- and I say it beseechingly, urgently --
Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you struck him; acknowledge it like a man and say you didn’t mean to. Yes, always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.
Go to bed early, get up early -- this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some say get up with one thing, others with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time -- it’s no trick at all.
Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young out not to lie at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain , and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail -- these are requirements; these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as the sure foundation for future eminence.
Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that “Truth is mighty and will prevail” -- the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal. There is in Boston a monument of the man who discovered anesthesia; many people are aware, in these latter days, that that man didn’t discover it at all, but stole the discovery from another man. Is this truth mighty, and will it prevail? Ah no, my hearers, the monument is made of hardy material, but the lie it tells will outlast it a million years. An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years -- except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours. A final word: begin your practice of this gracious and beautiful art early -- begin now. If I had begun earlier, I could have learned how.
Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but

heedless handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right -- it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of. Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring hings that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time, at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it make one shudder.
There are many sorts of books; but good ones are the sort for the young to read. remember that. They are a great, an inestimable, and unspeakable means of improvement. Therefore be careful in your selection, my young friends; be very careful; confine yourselves exclusively to Robertson’s Sermons , Baxter’s Saints' Rest ,
The Innocents Abroad , and works of that kind.
But I have said enough. I hope you will treasure up the instructions which I have given you, and make them a guide to your feet and a light to your understanding. Build your character thoughtfully and painstakingly upon these precepts, and by and by, when you have got it built, you will be surprised and gratified to see how nicely and sharply it resembles everybody else’s.