Jack Merridew's Dark Side Of The Catcher In The

Every character has what is known as a ‘dark side’, but not all of them show it. Instead they try to hide it. In Lord of the Flies, Jack Merridew uses face paint as basically a mask to make him more mean-looking when he’s hunting with his crew to hide his ‘dark side’. In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll makes a potion that turns him into Mr. Hyde to cover Dr. Jekyll’s ‘dark side’. Last of all, in The Catcher in the Rye, main character Holden Caulfield, carries a red hunting hat everywhere he goes to ‘hide from reality and the world’. Every character in every book hides their ‘dark side’ but they all do it in their own way.

On his first hunt, Jack Merridew fails to kill a pig. He wants to be seen as more ferocious, so he advises his crew to put on face paint. On his next hunting trip, he brings up to the mountain, a carcass of a pig. He wants to make the kill sound like it was more deadly than it actually was, so Jack says, “I painted my face-I stole up. Now you eat-all of you-and I-” (74) So basically, he used face paint to kinda make the kill look like it was deadly, giving no way at all to his ‘dark side’. Another example of when Jack hid his ‘dark side’ is when he is arguing to the boys about the sight of the beast. Jack takes the …show more content…
In William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies, Jack Merridew uses face-paint when he’s out hunting with his crew to hide ‘dark side’. In J.D Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, main character Holden Caulfield uses his red hunting hat, or, what writer John Green would describe as an emergency blanket, to hide from the real world and reality and his ‘dark side’. Finally, a hidden ‘dark side’ is best shown in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when Dr. Jekyll makes a potion in the final chapter that turns him into the face of Mr. Hyde, therefore hiding his ‘dark