I'm sorry I posted this so late and am now trying to get someone to review it. I need to turn this in in two days. Please keep an eye out for "fluff" or unneeded information that is saying something without saying it and contractions. My English teacher hates contractions. Any other grammical errors should be pointed out because I've gone over this a lot and can't find any more but I assure you, they're in there.
Animal Farm is a satire on the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Napoleon is Stalin. Snowball is Trotsky. The pigs are the communist party, and the animals are the peasant people.
Lord of the flies is about boys who have been stranded on a deserted island. There's a lot of symbolism I can't get into Jack is a choir boy who is the bad in all of us. Ralph is the happy medium, not too good, not too bad. Piggy is also in the middle probably better than most; he's also extremely smart and symbolizes logic on the island. Simon symbolizes religion and is the best we can ever be.
Order must prevail against the chaos of life with the help of power and intelligence. Animal Farm by George Orwell and Lord of the Flies by William Goldberg capture this struggle. Both novels also illustrate the need to have intelligence and power to create order.
In Animal Farm the animals, mainly the pigs, create a system where everyone has something to do at harvest. In chapter three, the animal's success is announced, “In the end they finished the harvest in two days' less time than it had usually taken Jones and his men. Moreover, it was the biggest harvest that the farm had ever seen.” Under the rule of Mr. Jones, the animals hadn't collected as much as they did under the rule of the pigs, free of drunkenness. Mr. Jones was becoming incapable of running a farm; the farm was falling into chaos in his hands. Snowball, the mastermind behind most of the mechanics behind the running of the farm, was intelligent and could easily take leadership. He begins to create the facade that Napoleon hides behind when he runs Snowball off of the farm. Mr. Pilkington will see this mask that Napoleon has created and will be fooled; the animals will continue to live in the dark shadow of chaos in Napoleon's rule. Intelligence and power are the two main factors behind order.
In Lord of the Flies the first creation of order is actually to harness that power to find leadership. The assemblies, though they hardly ever end in order, start with organization. There is voting and debating. Minds, intelligence, are put to the test, and Ralph has to stand up for what he knows is right, leadership. The conch controls these meetings and tries to keep chaos at bay. When the conch is shunned and the boys, mainly Jack, speak without the shell order quickly falls in the assembly. The assemblies are where all the important decisions are made. The assemblies create the animosity between Jack and Ralph. When Piggy, symbolizing intelligence, and the conch, symbolizing power, are destroyed in the name of “fun” the assemblies, the last tatters of order on the island, are forgotten, thus chaos reigns.
Chaos, in Animal Farm, takes hold for a large portion of the novel. After Snowball, the intelligence, is driven away by Napoleon the farm is driven into a chaos. It is a chaos masquerading as the perfect order Snowball planned but the animals are starving; they are overworked. The schedule is work everyday of the week until you cannot work any longer. That isn't order. The farm still has power. It still has that force pushing them toward a goal. The power, now Napoleon instead of Snowball, is not led by logic. His intelligence is corrupted by greed and evil. The goal has changed with the power. The goal is no longer for the good of all but for the good of few, the pigs. The pigs have exploited their power, thus the system no longer works. The objects of man, the things so coveted by the pigs, are their undoing.
Jack is the main facet of chaos in Lord of the Flies, the power pushing in the wrong direction. In Lord of the Flies, Jack creates many instances of chaos. The one with the most dire consequences that shows why order is needed in society would be the killing of Simon, the good on the island. Simon is murdered during a thunderstorm, nature's own chaos. Fear, a primeval emotion that overrides intelligence and even power, takes hold of the boys. Piggy, intelligence, even becomes part of the chaos though only of the outer edges. In the disarray, Simon, the pureness, the hope of the boys is mistaken for the opposite. The boys think they have killed the beast, the evil that actually rests in themselves.
After the death of Simon, Ralph has a lapse of hope and loses his power. The savages then have the power; Jack is in power; paint is in power. Power, as Animal Farm showed us, is not all that is needed. The power on the island has no goal. They just want “fun.” Since Ralph has lost his power there is no longer a need for civilization or order. Even rescue has fallen after “fun.” The savages do not have intelligence in the sane, logical meaning of the word. After the death of Simon the boys throw the last shreds of civilization, order, from them. Nothing is too horrible, and chaos, in the most unhampered form, commands the island practically undeterred.
Life is chaos. Every society has fallen to chaos during at some point. One could call it a way of nature. The fact is, if you don't have a force driving you in one direction and intelligence to guide that force, order is nonexistent.
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