Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Examine Ralph's exuberance during the hunt. What does this scene, including using Robert as a surrogate, suggest about Ralph and people in general?

21 comments:

  1. During the hunt, all the boys including Ralph were caught up in the excitement of the moment. When Ralph wounded the boar on its snout, he was very proud of himself. The other boys (as well as Ralph himself) now saw Ralph as brave and courageous, and they respected him more for it. After the hunt was over, the excitement of the hunt got too far out of hand. The boys relived the hunt by pretending Robert was the boar and by hurting him. Golding writes, "Robert squealed in mock terror, then in real pain...Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric's spear and jabbed at Robert with it." He then writes, "Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering."
    This passage shows how susceptible individuals are both to their emotions and to the need to have power over something. The excitement and rush that came from exercising power over a living creature is almost a high, and is way too easy to get caught up in.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The reason this passage is so important is because it shows just how dangerous the island really is. Of course there are hazards on the island like rocks, thorns, and the ocean, but the true danger is how quickly and easily the island can take the civility of the children. Throughout the whole book Ralph has been the one that has been trying to make sure that the boys remember that being rescued is more important than killing a pig. Yet, in just one hunt Ralph briefly becomes just like the rest of them. This whole passage goes back to the fact the people feel the need to have power over other living things. And soon when power over pigs starts to get old, the hunters are going to want to move onto something bigger.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This scene suggests that when one's animalistic nature is unleashed, sometimes it is nearly impossible to get a hold of it again. This also happened to Jack when he took guard off of the fire to hunt and kill a wild pig. The boys reenacting the hunt, with Robert as the pig, and taking it too far forshadows a death among the boys. The boys continue to test the boundries and soon they will just completely disregard them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is a very inportant passage in the chapter. This animalistic behavior suggests that they are losing touch with the life they once knew. Furthermore, it shows that the boys are getting easily distracted by unreasonable things. An example of this is when they reenact the hunting situation and use Robert as the boar. At first it seemed like a game to the children but then it soon turned serious. They jump, chant, dance and jab Robert with their makeshirt spears. Robert is injured by one of the jabs and tries to crawl away from the other boys in an attempt to save himself. This is only when the boys stop and realize that they have injured their fellow "hunter". This is important because it shows how carried away with things, and as stated above by stottlemeyer, it foreshadows a death amoung the boys. In conclusin, the whole jabbing scene of Robert shows that sometimes they boys get so carried away the they lose touch with reality and turn into savage beasts.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ralph’s exuberance just goes to show that he can have a sense of adventure and fun as well. He joins the other boys in “attacking” Robert because he is following their lead. He follows them because he enjoyed the feeling of adrenaline and fun when he hit the boar. Ralph joins the boys so he could have that feeling again. He was caught up with the excitement of the others. He became arrogant when he actually hit the boar. These feelings and emotions caused Ralph to lose control of his normal self, thus resulting in an overwhelming sense of longing for action and adrenaline.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ralph was, in a sense becoming just like Jack during his first hunt...He felt overly proud of himself and acted like nothing else but the hunt mattered. Ralph was also glad to regain that certain feeling of power over the boys (the same feeling of power he had felt when they first had established the conch rule.) The fact that the boys (Ralph included) had used Robert as a "pig" and had litterarly hurt him makes the boys seem as savage as the island. The true terrors and/or beasts on this island are the boys themselves (at least the biguns.)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Ralph’s exuberance suggests that he has given in to his primitive instincts. Ralph, the character who was once the essence of order and society, has now become tainted. Even the pure has become corrupted which shows the extent of the chaos and savagery

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ralphs exeuberance shows how adrenaline and excitement can take over you and make you feel good and powerful. And his attack against robert is a group thing just as well as him looking for that adrenaline rush he had when he hit the boar with the spear

    ReplyDelete
  9. Ralph's ebullience after stabbing the boar contrives Ralph's desire for power. Conjointly, Ralph in starting to become just like the other kids and coalesce in their immature behavior. He finds the killing of the boar boisterous and then the boys reenact the killing with Ralph as the pig which could possibly adumbrate Ralph wanting to move on to superior beings such as the other group members. This is caused by the gradual disspation of the civilty of the boys because the rules and boundaries that they keep testing are becoming less exigent. To sum up, Ralph's exuberance is alarming because he is the leader of the boys and most civil of the boys, and if he is starting to loose control in spite of his ardor then most likely the other boys are just going to start getting worse and worse in terms of their behavior and civilty.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The ardor that Ralph shows when he kills the boar demonstrates the more primitive side of him. Thus far, Ralph has symbolized the more civilized portion of the boys. However, now that he he has felt the exhilaration of "the hunt", his primitive side shows itself. This buoyancy continues on when they reenact the scene and Roberts mock pain turns to real pain as Ralph gets too caught up in their reenactment of him hitting the boar and actually hits Robert.

    ReplyDelete
  11. During the hunt, all the characters including Ralph, become completely engulfed in the excitement. While all the other boys jump away when charged by the wild boar, the normally well controlled and proper Ralph stabs the pig in the snout with his wooden spear. Ralph is very proud of himself, repeatedly saying " I hit him!..I hit him!.. Did you see me?" With a rush of adrenaline, Robert takes on the role of a fake pig and the other kids play attack him. While this game starts out as fun, the wanting of death among the boys is evident. As the boys begin to attack "Robert squealed out in mock terror and then in real pain.. Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh". To have the normally calm and collected Ralph act in this way shows people can change through experiences. In our society, if a child were to kill an animal for pleasure and excitement they would be marked as troubled and violent. Although Ralph and the boys need to kill the pigs for food, they have taken killing a step further, as a means of pleasure and excitement. The boys that were once civilized are becoming brutal. The attack on Robert became so out of hand that it might of ended in a fatality. Where will the line be drawn for these boys? One does not know. It seems as if the children are losing their grasp of the difference between the life of an animal, and the life of a human being.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Ralph's exuberance marks the transition from his dislike of the hunt as a symbol of permanency o n the island to there being virtually no authority, and the hope of rescue has become even less. Using Robert as a surrogate showed That the leap of imagination could be maid, and eventually one will accidentally kill another.

    (Mozilla Firefox has a built in spell checker- http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/ )

    ReplyDelete
  13. Ralph's exuberance confirms the fact that the boy's instincts are all changing. They are becoming more animalistic and uncivilized as time goes on. Ralph continuously repeated, "I hit him." He was so proud of the fact that on his first hunt he hit the boar, he gets caught up in his own excitment. The way the boys played the "game" with Robert as the boar foreshadows the death or murder of a boy on the island. It's apparent that Ralph, the leader on the island, is losing all control of his civilized behavior, so what does that say for the other boys? Like Rhino Page said, they will obviously follow in his footesteps and complete chaos will occur. The way the boys all become animal like or savages when they hunt shows how much they are changing.

    ReplyDelete
  14. In this scene Ralph and the other boys are caught up in the excitement of hunting down a boar and killing it. When Ralph wounds the boar in the snout he feels very accomplished and realises why Jack is so obsessed with hunting is because of the excitement and the intensity of hunting something. The boys that were on the hunt now saw Ralph the same way that they saw Jack when Jack had killed a pig. They saw Ralph as a brave and courageous person. After the hunt when the boys are dancing and chanting and re-enacting the hunt, the excitement of the hunt became uncontrolable. At first the littluns se it as a game with Robert pretending to be the pig, but then the excitement gets out of control and they actually start to jab Robert with their spears. The behavior of Ralph and the other boys suggests that the elements of the island and the excitement of certain things such as hunting are the things that the group is moore interested in rather than keeping a fire going or maintaining the civility in the group. This scene shows that when the group's behavior gets out of hand, nothing gets done and someone always ends up getting hurt. If the group's behavior continues, then one of the characters might get killed and I think that this scene is foreshadowing one of the characters getting killed in the future. In my previous blog, I had said that in Chapter 4, the group takes its first step away from civility and its first step towards savagery. The scene where Robert gets jabbed by the spears, is the second step towards savagery. The next steps that the group might take towards savagery might lead to the death of one of the characters. Hopefully they will straighten out their priorities and come to their senses before this happens.

    ReplyDelete
  15. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  16. The scene where Ralph strikes the boar in the snout portrays the innate drive of humans towards savagery and violence. Up to this point, Ralph has never been on a hunt before and therefore has failed to see what causes the exhilaration in the other boys while hunting. Here, however, Ralph gets lost in the other boys’ cravings for blood. Golding specifically uses Ralph to act like a madman because he is the one who wants to maintain a civilized order. Peoples’ undeniable instinct to kill a vulnerable creature in such settings causes him to forget his morals and attack the boar. Even though the boar escapes and he has not accomplished any good for the group, he confidently boasts to the rest of the boys. This foreshadows the inescapable downfall of the boys and their inevitable road to savagery. The scene where Robert gets nearly killed by the other boys reinforces this idea. The boys used Robert as a defenseless being to spear and attack while he tried to escape. This also foreshadows the boys’ shift from killing pigs and wild animals, to killing themselves. When the feeling of killing a pig becomes unsatisfying for the hunters, their instincts will shift them towards the killing of their peers.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Chapter seven's events show that like the other boys, Ralph is slowly regressing and losing his civility. At first, Ralph thought that hunting pigs was pointless, but after he discovered what it felt like to participate in the hunt, he changed his mind. After wounding the pig, Ralph realizes that the boys have new respect for him. He discovers that to gain their attention and following he must stoop to their level of interest--not in making fires for rescue, but in hunting for meat. Rogers acting exemplifies this interest, because right after the hunt all the boys want to do is relive the excitement. They even jokingly consider using littluns as mock pigs. In general, people like to gain respect, no matter in what way it is achieved, even if it involves acting uncivilly.

    ReplyDelete
  18. The exuberance Ralph showed during the hunt shows how people can get caught up and lose sight of what‘s right. Ralph goes from refusing to hunt to participating in one because he felt as if he was losing touch with the group. After failing to capture the pig, Ralph tries to show everyone the adrenaline during the chase with the pig by reenacting the incident with Robert instead. Golding expressed Robert emotions during the reenactment similarly with that of a pig, “Robert squealed in mock terror”. Obviously the boys don’t seem to be joking around either as they almost kill him, “Jack had him by the hair and was brandishing his knife. Behind him was Roger, fighting to get close”. When one has the power over the life of another it is easy to lose civility, and possibly see your own allies as enemies.

    ReplyDelete
  19. In the previous manipulative battles between Ralph and Jack, the former was a representative of civility. Jack, ferreting for power and attention, pulls on the boys' temptations so to give himself an opportunity to lead. When Ralph joins the hunt for the beast after giving in to his loss of control of the group, the apprehension of confronting the pig and the pride of being able to overcome the apprehension gives him the same exuberance the other hunters also feel. As the persona of civility, this behavior shows that he is loosing more than just the control over the other boys. He is loosing control over himself. I agree with ‘fliesofthelord’ about the foreshadowing of the boys’ obvious downfall. Robert’s acting scene is an example of how extreme the situation can get. It suggested that it is not the pig meat that appeals to the boys as Jack had previously reasoned to Ralph, but the act of chasing and killing during the hunt that gives them a high. They are reaching a new level of savagery where they find glee in the idea of killing, even if it is a fellow companion.

    ReplyDelete
  20. ralph is now getting a taste of what everyone was talking about when they get so excited in the hunt. they all get a little to pumped up about it and they end up hurting robert

    ReplyDelete
  21. i think that Ralph is so exuberant during the hunt because he finally sees what it is like for the hunters and understands the thrill of the adrenaline that they get. Also, i found it interesting that he kept asking every body if they saw what he did. i think that he wanted to show the other boys that he could kill a boar too. this was very important to him because of the power struggle between him and jack. in spearing the boar in the hunt, he is saying 'so what if jack can kill a boar? i can do that too. what's so great about him?'

    ReplyDelete