Jack Merridew
Jack Merridew Jack is the oldest of the group. He is a tall, thin, and bony boy with red hair and a freckled face. He symbolizes responsibility, barbaric behavior, evil, and irrational thinking. He symbolizes responsibility because he was responsible for the actions of his group, the hunters. As the head of the hunters, it was his job to make sure they were always on task and that they bring food (meat) for the rest of the group. He symbolizes barbaric behavior by the way he treats the littluns and Piggy. The natural instinct of any older human being is to comfort the little children when they are scared, frightened, and unsure of their actions. Jack frightens them even more by telling them that there was a beast that they would hunt it down. He betrays Ralph and the rest of the tribe by abandoning them and creating his own tribe, forcing half the group to join it. He is a savage because of the way he does things to get what he wants. Instead of simply asking, he raids Ralph’s camp to get fire and Piggy’s specs. He is evil because he refuses to hear out Ralph and Piggy and insists that he is right the whole time. Jack almost caused almost all of the catastrophes that happened in the book. He wasn’t thinking right in the way he led his tribe to act. He made them think that acting maliciously instead of being civil was the way to go. In the end, he set the whole island on fire just to hunt down Ralph so he could kill him. Jack had a dramatic change in his attitude that started to be revealed in Chapter 5 when he started to yell at Ralph, broke all the rules, and caused the whole assembly to leave. In the beginning, he was following what Ralph says and he was actually up for helping them get rescued. In Chapter 5 and onward, he went against what Ralph stood for. Jack symbolizes what we should not do and what we should not become if we were placed into their situation. Jack symbolizes some good things and bad things.