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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)

#71

Post by samatman »

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.

World War II happened largely because the Great War happened.

I'm comfortable describing the reasons for the Great War as "dumb". Your mileage may vary.

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

#72

Post by geocrasher »

chriskanan wrote: post #5
Zamicol wrote: post #2

My high school's district required students to read The of Lord of the Flies. My freshmen English teacher hated the book so much he broke district requirements and told my class he was giving everyone A's on that assignment. He asked the class to read any substitute book in its place. To this day I still consider him to be a wise teacher.

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.

Me: High School Sophomore in the early 90's

Class: English

Book: The Lilies of the Field

Assignment: Write about what the main character (Homer) does after leaving the nuns he'd helped.

What I did: Wrote a hysterical (to me, at the time) story about how he went to South America in search of a mystical coffee with some made up Latin name which, when translated, meant "Grave-digging coffee that really stinks". I'm still proud of that line. His team of scientists (who all looked like "Billy" from The Far Side) were all killed in various ways while traversing the Amazon, all of them funny (to me, at the time). I was very, very happy with myself. Creative writing was fun.

Teacher: Rewrite it, be serious.

Me: Wrote some drivel that I hated, turned it in, got a lousy grade.

That stifled me for a long time, because it's been hard ever since to just let loose on a story. I criticize it every step of the way now. I find short form poetry (often as music lyrics) to be far simpler and just as expressive if not more so.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

stephenhuey wrote: post #60
mythrwy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being stunned in high school that people would get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases obviously didn't intend. This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming raci…

While some may analyze beautiful literature into oblivion and I feel your pain, I can’t agree with you on Huck Finn. My interpretation of the intro you quoted is very different from yours. Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62739 Even though he masterfully wove his b…

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by mythrwy »

stephenhuey wrote: post #60
mythrwy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being stunned in high school that people would get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases obviously didn't intend. This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming raci…

While some may analyze beautiful literature into oblivion and I feel your pain, I can’t agree with you on Huck Finn. My interpretation of the intro you quoted is very different from yours. Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62739 Even though he masterfully wove his b…

My take is he was sort of the Mike Judge of his time. Less a moralist, more a cynical and very amusing observer of human frailty.

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

#75

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Andrex wrote: post #40
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.

The coin flip in the book is that they had two potential leaders, one of the responsible and the other one pretty sociopathic but charismatic - the nascent society followed the sociopathic, charismatic one.

At any rate there were quite a few more kids than 6 in the book, so pointing at this incident and saying 'see, it would work out' is just silly.

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

#76

Post by edejong »

lumost wrote: post #29
Syonyk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 recently learned that 19th century literature was often released one chapter at a time. This lead to substantial "filler" chapters which were required for the author to keep the story going. I sometimes wonder if at least some portion of literary analysis is equivalent to teaching contemporary fan theories while waiting for the next episode/sequel/release.

A bit like modern television series, isn’t it?

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

#77

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

mythrwy wrote: post #53
Syonyk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 remember being stunned in high school that people would get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases obviously didn't intend. This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming raci…

This reads like something you would find on the ThatHappened subreddit. I bet your classmates also clapped after you so brutally took down that dumbass teacher with facts and logic, right?

You had to take that class to learn not to take everything you read at face value. As sometimes happen people decide to go the other way around and declare that texts never have any deeper meaning and that it is all just nonsense and gosh darn how can those liberal arts even exist??????

It’s a shame because it prevents you from enjoying literature at a deeper level, instead of saying that Anna Karenina is the exact same as some silly airport novel.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

Zamicol wrote: post #2

My high school's district required students to read The of Lord of the Flies. My freshmen English teacher hated the book so much he broke district requirements and told my class he was giving everyone A's on that assignment. He asked the class to read any substitute book in its place. To this day I still consider him to be a wise teacher.

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by croes »

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.

>humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

But it's the exception not the norm in human behaviour.

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

#80

Post by watwut »

kgeist wrote: post #65

Survivorship bias? If another group of boys failed to form a successful team with enough skills to survive, they wouldn't have survived to tell their story. So it's not surprising that the author only found a successful story. We don't know what happens to the thousands of boys who go missing every year.

> We don't know what happens to the thousands of boys who go missing every year.

These are not lost kids surviving islands. These are kids escaping abusive situations. They typically become homeless, get money either by small crimes or sex work. They eventually end up in prison fairly often.

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