The Help By Kathryn Stockett: A Literary Analysis

Courage is something not everyone possesses but when fighting for what you believe in it comes naturally. The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding and The Help by Kathryn Stockett are comparable in terms of setting, theme, conflict and symbols. In these books the main characters fight for what they believe in even though everyone else disagrees. In Golding’s book a group of British boys get trapped on a tropical island and over time become savages. In Stockett’s novel a white woman decides to help the black community by writing a book about black maids to help calm the racism in their town. Fighting for what you believe in is hard especially when you are in an odd place. In Lord of the Flies the main character Ralph is on an uninhabited island during World War Two. Ralph has few supplies on the island. Golding describes the setting as “The sore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a …show more content…
In Golding’s novel the conch represents civilization and order, “I’m going to him with this conch in my hands. I’m going to hold it out” (Golding 189). This shows that the conch symbolizes civilization because Piggy was going to show the conch to Jack in hopes he would remember civilization. In Stockett’s novel the bathroom initiative represents how the white community thinks the black community is disgusting and less than them. “All these houses their building without maids quarters? It’s just plain dangerous. Everybody knows they carry different diseases than we do” (Stockett 8). The whites believe that the blacks should not be allowed to use their bathrooms because the blacks are considered dirty. These symbols are similar because they both play a big part on how the characters act throughout the novels and their opinions on certain things although they symbolize different