To be alone (Lord of the flies essay)

Are humans naturally extroverted? Do they crave to be with people even if they claim they want to be alone? When you are left alone and you're just sitting with nothing but your thoughts. That feels like human nature to want to be alone but being alone has been proven to drive people mad. It's uncanny to be left alone just with your thoughts. The show samurai jack revolves around him being all alone and stuck with his thoughts. Truly man's greatest fear is to be alone and hunted.


Comparing the scene in Lord of the Flies where Piggy dies and Ralph is kind of kicked out of the group and left all alone. In the new series of Samurai Jack (Season 5) it picks up where Jack left off trying to find a way to a portal back home except since the evil Aku rules the world in the future and wants Jack dead. So Aku sends assassins to kill Jack but Jack usually finds a way to defeat them. I’m comparing this to the scene where Ralph is hiding from the boys and says “He jerked his head off the ground and listened...He knew he had heard it before, somewhere but had no time to remember.”(196)


In the novel, during this encounter, Ralph is scrambling around running away from Jack’s evil possible because they are trying to kill him. While he’s hiding and trying not to get caught, the boys still look for him. The reason why this part is so very intense is because it shows how alone Ralph is and how scared he is, in this point in time. He’s all alone and no one can help him, everyone is against him and there is nothing he can do about it. It’s very interesting how things changed to when everyone was on at least ok terms and the next thing you know Ralph is running for his life filled with fear that he’s going to end up like Piggy and Simon. What are you supposed to do if everyone you know is trying to kill you? Just like animals, when people are cornered they’ll do anything to get out.


Many other characters from different stories and movies go through this kind of thing where everyone is trying to kill them. Mostly with strong characters like John Wick, who is being hunted by all the assassins in the area, or as I said Samurai Jack who’s being hunted and he’s seen as a criminal and no one is on his side. It’s a very interesting change of pace when you don’t have a person who can take out millions of people or is virtually untouchable, and you replace him with a small child, who has never fought a day in his life, is physically average for his age, then send a bunch of people to hunt him.


You see this in the hunger games when you have a moment where Katniss is hiding from Cato just after she blows up their stockpile with mines. In that moment where Katniss is just watching this unnamed character get yelled at and then killed for something he didn’t do, I can compare this to how Ralph felt like when he was all alone, and watching the boys run around looking for him with their sticks sharpened at both ends. In general there are a lot of parallels between the hunger games (the part with the actual fighting) and the events where Ralph is running and hiding from the boys. Even Katniss in the first part of the hunger games struggles with the idea being alone, when she first starts and is sleeping in a tree, she has to find her own way. The thought of her being alone scares her but she does it anyway because what other choice does she have if she want to survive.


“Someone cried out Ralph Jerked his cheek off the ground and looked into the dull light”(198). I think this is an excellent moment because it adds to the fact that Ralph doesn't even have time to inspect who cried out or lift his face off the ground softly he just gets up and books it, he’s in instinct mode and what I think why he’s in such a panicked mode is just apart how humans react in general to dangerous situations. For instance back when there was early man there was no reason or talking you either fought or ran away.


A real life example of people panicking because they feel alone and the world has betrayed them. A case study in 1989 talks about how they had two young adults put in a room, no windows, no people, just a bed and what happens was the 2nd patient after nine hours he started to experience hyperventilation, and starting acting violent in contrast to his cool demeanor at the start of the experiment “It’s been a day now let me out!” a quote he says when it's been in the 9th hour. They let him out early and is surprised to see that it hasn’t been the full 9 hours yet. “I’ve never been alone for that long in my life, I started to panic thinking I would never get to see society again”. This proves my point even more in the novel during the last chapter Ralph starts to get more desperate and is at a showdown on page 198 when he is debating what should he should do. The quote is “What could they do?, beat him? So what? Kill him?”. You can tell how broken a character is, if they are debating to kill them by the end of the book.


At the end of the day, no one truly wants to be alone forever no matter what they say. Sure brakes are needed from time to time with people, but if you are the last person around and there is no one to talk to or challenge you or anything what's the point of living. Also, humans seem to be able to go one-hundred percent when they are alone and being hunted. My reasoning for this is because they either have nothing to lose or you have so much to lose. Like Ralph if he were to die on the island he would lose his family and hope. In Samurai Jack, our protagonist Jack talks to himself a lot and thinks everything would be easier if he was dead, but he realizes that if not him, who else will stop Aku.

Work cited

Golding,William, Lord of the flies. New york: Penguin 2006.


Tartakovsky,Genndy “Jack is back”  Tonami: 2017. http://www.adultswim.com/videos/samurai-jack/


Collins, Suzanne “The Hunger Games” New york, Scholastic 2010: https://www.scholastic.com/thehungergames/media/TheHungerGamesExcerpt_Ch1-2.pdf

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