John Steinbeck once said “It is the responsibility of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and to hold up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. ” This basically means it is important that the author does its job to show faults, failures, struggles, and hardships in a character’s life in order to demonstrate how they became stronger and improved upon their failures. This quote is valid because one can normally not improve upon nothing.
In order for a person to learn, they must try to succeed and even if they fail, they take that with them while they grow older and use it to reflect their new actions with. The novel Lord of the Flies written by William Golding demonstrates usages of characterization and conflict through the validity of the quote. One literary element Golding uses in the novel titled Lord of the Flies is characterization. Characterization is the combination of all the things and author does to create the personality of a character in a piece of literature.
For example, throughout the story, the read learns a lot about the character of Jack. We learn that he is a very determined young boy. He does not like to give up when he fails; he likes to keep going until he is successful. In the beginning of the novel, Ralph, Jack, and Simon come across a pig and Jack wants to kill it for meat. Jack attempts to kill it and fails, but he becomes very determined to kill one before they left the island. During chapter three, entitled “Huts on the Beach,” Jack is once again not successful in the killing of the pig and becomes sad all over again.
He stabs the pig but is unable to kill it. Throughout chapter seven, the boys are still trying to hunt down the pig but he gets away, once again. Finally, during chapter eight, the pig is finally killed. Jack becomes determined and awfully savage, killing the pig with his boys after torturing him continuously. (page 138) This proves the quote is valid because it shows that Jack kept failing along with the other boys, and his characteristic of determination kept him going until he learned from it and succeeded. Another literary element that is used throughout the story is theme.
Golding’s theme of “Every man is born savage and learns to be civilized” is shown often through the entire novel of Lord of the Flies. Throughout the story, the boys become more and more savage. They realize its not going to be easy living on this island alone as young boys and they begin to become selfish and dangerous. The boys begin to torture and injury animals, pick on each other, ditch each other, outvote one another, and the worst, even kill one of them. They become so hypnotized and don’t even realize what they did when they killed Simon.
They were thinking of it as a game and got carried away and ended up killing him for their own selfish desire. Golding demonstrates how easy it is for people to revert back to savagery after becoming civilized. A reason Golding wrote this novel was to teach the readers how to prevent it from happening again. This example proves the quote by John Steinbeck to be valid because its showing that its easy to make mistakes and easy to fail, but one has to learn how to take those mistakes and learn from them in order to become new people and in this case become civilized. It is the responsibility of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and to hold up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement,” once stated by John Steinbeck, is a great example quote demonstrated in the Lord of the Flies written by William Golding. It can be shown through the point of view of many literary elements including characterization and theme. As a result, one can not learn from nor improve off of anything; they have to have mistakes in their lives in order to learn from them and become a better, in William Golding’s case more civilized, human being.
