"Lord of the Flies" BY: William GoldingWhen a group of children become stranded on a deserted island, the rules of society no longer apply to them. Without parental supervision or the law, their primitive human nature comes out. William Golding portrays this primitive human nature exceptionally in the novel "Lord of the Flies". This interesting book is about 223 pages long and was first published in 1958. The key summary of this book is that a group of English schoolchildren who are aged 6 to 12 years old and crash land on an island somewhere in the Pacific . This could have been a dream come true for the boys; no teachers, no parents and no rules telling them what to do or not to do, but this wasn't even remotely a dream come true, in reality it was a nightmare. There is a pretty decent range of characters playing different roles in the story but the main characters of the book are: Jack, Ralph and Piggy. Jack Merridew started out as the arrogant and self-righteous leader of a choir. The freedom of the island allowed him to further develop the dark side of his personality as the leader of a wild tribe. He eventually took power through brute force and had no human feelings towards the end. He was completely a savage. Ralph, on the other hand, started out as a confident boy whose self-confidence came from the acceptance of his peers. He had a fair character, as he was willing to listen to Piggy. He was softer than Jack and also became quite dependent on Piggy's wisdom throughout the book. Piggy himself was an educated boy who grew up as an outcast. Due to his academic childhood, he was more mature than other boys and maintained his civil behavior. But his experiences on the island have given him a more realistic understanding of the cruelty possessed by some people, and this is due to his level of maturity. He was actually able to observe what was happening to everyone. The setting of this book is basically when a plane load of school age kids get stranded on a deserted tropical island after their plane is accidentally shot down during World War II. They are completely alone on this island in the Pacific Ocean. The island they are on is a tropical island, full of trees and greenery.