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When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

theguardian.com

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Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#31

Post by paleotrope »

Syonyk wrote: post #14
chriskanan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.

> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise. That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else. It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate boo…

The Great Gatsby and that light. Grrr.

I actually read it again 30 years later and it's a pretty good book. Terrible people in it though.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#32

Post by anotherman554 »

filleduchaos wrote: post #26
anotherman554 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

"Distasteful" and "dumb" are far from the same thing, and the second world war happened for the former and not the latter.

It's a distinction without a difference- one could argue a less primitive species wouldn't have found itself caught in world wars. The man-children starting world wars are paralleled by the children-children killing each other on the island.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#34

Post by beachy »

filleduchaos wrote: post #26
anotherman554 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

"Distasteful" and "dumb" are far from the same thing, and the second world war happened for the former and not the latter.

Pointless pendatry over words doesn't move discussion forwards. I wouldn't personally use either of those words to describe Nazis, which is largely what WWII "happened for".

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#36

Post by DavidSJ »

Syonyk wrote: post #14
chriskanan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.

> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise. That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else. It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate boo…

High school English class was like this for me too. It was usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once wrote, “stubbornly sticks to his opinions even when wrong”.

One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#37

Post by XorNot »

anotherman554 wrote: post #19
andrei_says_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general. Given that this really happened, a lot. Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction. I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we…

Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

No, but the why is. It's worthwhile being very careful taking fiction books as a depiction of how peoples minds work, because they're just plainly not - they're a depiction of how a very small subset (authors who publish books) think peoples minds work.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#38

Post by trhway »

Clewza313 wrote: post #35

From the other end of the spectrum, a famous case of (adults) getting shipwrecked and going batshit insane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(1628_ship)

The Bounty mutineers' settlement on an uninhabited island also comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty#Pitcairn

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#39

Post by hypnoscripto »

Syonyk wrote: post #14
chriskanan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.

> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise. That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else. It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate boo…

I kind of enjoyed the absurdity of it, but I openly acknowledged it was a game. Fortunately discussions at my highschool after freshman year were less about the teacher imposing their will, and new ideas were the most rewarded. It was fun racing to support tenuous conclusions before anyone else could.

Spanish Literature was an especially exciting class. I still think one of the greatest accomplishments of my life was writing a two page Spanish paper on a 12 line poem and only receiving marks off for grammatical mistakes. My teacher even wrote "haha" in the margins next to one of my more ridiculous explanations, but didn't say it was necessarily wrong. I used the improvisational analysis techniques I learned in those classes to entertain art student friends in college sometimes. Especially popular with free drinks in an art gallery.

Re: When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

#40

Post by Andrex »

rossdavidh wrote: post #4

It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they di…

> There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they did not.

The fact that it's a coin flip is the key aspect of the message Golding wanted to impart. It's chilling, and unsurprising, that reality bears it out.

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