Introduction
The third in the Englishedu ‘literary frameworks’ series for A Level English Literature, this guide explores and exemplifies ways of analysing an author’s creation and presentation of characters in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.
Characters and characterisation: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to closely analyse a text in terms of the theme above is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully chosen quotations in a variety of ways. These bullet points also include commentaries which aim to explain how and why such sections have been analysed and what they could highlight within the main text, contextually and thematically.
There are, of course, many more things that could be said about each extract, but it’s hoped that it will prove useful in your initial teaching stages to model it using the examples and then to ask students to find other things that they could analyse themselves as well as to consider ‘alternative’ interpretations and to derive possible contextual aspects.
From Lord of the Flies by William Golding
They spread out, nervously, in the forest. Almost at once Jack found the dug and...
