Madeline Rosen
English
Mr Darr
Period 6
Lord of the Flies Response Essay
Post publication of the novel, Lord of the Flies, there have been many essays
written responding to it. The first essay I chose to respond to was ,“Themes and
Construction: in 'Lord of the Flies'”, written by Henningfield, exploring the elements of
the literature and apparent themes to go more in depth of the novel. Next, I chose to
respond to, “'Lord of the Flies' 60 Years Later”, by Lois Lowry because I was intrigued
about how a person could still connect with a book and its characters six decades later.
Lastly, I expanded on the essay, “Irony in 'Lord of the Flies'”, by Henri Talon because
irony is something I had trouble finding in Lord of the Flies, and I wanted to look into it
more. Each one of these essays helped me explore all of the elements of the novel and
made much sense of, Lord of the flies.
The essay, “Themes and Construction: in 'Lord of the Flies'”, written by
Henningfield, explores the idea of themes and construction in the novel. The author
choose five of the most prevalent themes and elaborates on them. These themes are good
and evil, appearances and reality, reason and emotion, and morals/ morality. The theme
that caught my attention the most was morals/morality because he uses the line, "the
moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual
and not on any political system.", to expand on this idea. What I took out of this is that in
order for a society to maintain order, the people must work together. They will survive as
a cohesive unit only if they work together for the greater good. The reason why I found
this essay to be so persuasive, is because it reinforces lessons from the book while also
giving advice that is relevant in today’s world. Also, the author considers, Lord of the
Flies, to be one of the greatest novels of all time. After his exploration of these specific
constructions, point of view, symbolism, and settings, it is obvious why he and many
others feel this same way. This is an opinion that I would certainly agree with.
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