Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Today, we finished watching "The Human Experiment." We then discussed it in relation to the novelm The Lord of the Flies. I then provided notes on this novel, defining allegory and its connection to the novel itself. I have pasted them here for those who were not present. These can also be found through an inquiry search on the Internet. Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. The boys as a whole can represent humanity as a whole (a microcosm of the world they came from). · The island is the entire world · The boys’ rules become the world’s varying governments (two tribes are two countries, and so on). · The boys’ fighting is equivalent to a war. · The only time we pull out of the allegory is at the very end of the novel, when the other “real” world breaks through the imaginary barrier around the island.