Read the passages from Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Passage 1

Indignation took away Ralph’s control.

"I was talking about smoke! Don’t you want to be rescued? All you can talk about is pig, pig, pig!”

"But we want meat!”

"And I work all day with nothing but Simon and you come back and don’t even notice the huts!”

"I was working too—”

"But you like it!” shouted Ralph. "You want to hunt! While I—”

They faced each other on the bright beach, astonished at the rub of feeling. Ralph looked away first, pretending interest in a group of littluns on the sand. From beyond the platform came the shouting of the hunters in the swimming pool. On the end of the platform, Piggy was lying flat,

looking down into the brilliant water.

"People don’t help much.”

He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.

Passage 2

"You got to be tough now. Make 'em do what you want.”

Ralph answered in the cautious voice of one who rehearses a theorem.

"If I blow the conch and they don’t come back, then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.”

"If you don’t blow, we’ll soon be animals anyway. I can’t see what they’re doing but I can hear.”

The dispersed figures had come together on the sand and were a dense black mass that revolved. They were chanting something and littluns that had had enough were staggering away, howling. Ralph raised the conch to his lips and then lowered it.

The universal theme of Passage 1 is the conflict between an individual’s desires and the community’s needs, and the universal theme of Passage 2 is the importance of hope to human happiness. How do these universal themes relate to each other?

They both demonstrate that people can rarely trust each other.
They both warn about the dangers of having a negative perspective.
They both show that people act in a way that benefits themselves.
They both emphasize the difficulty of conflicting goals between individuals.