Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Ralph, Jack, and Simon return from their reconnaissance in the late afternoon. Ralph blows the conch to call the other boys back to assembly and describes the results of the exploration. Jack interrupts almost immediately to declare the importance of an army for hunting pigs. So that only one person will speak at a time in the assembly, Ralph makes the conch rule: Only the boy holding the conch can speak, and only Ralph can interrupt the one who holds the conch. Thus, a process for order and civil discourse is established.

Piggy takes the conch so he can make the point that no one knows the boys’ location, meaning that they may be on the island a long time. Ralph points out the bright side, the adventure inherent in their situation. At this point the group of littlest boys push a representative forward to describe the “beastie” he saw in the woods the night before; the older boys are quick to assure the littluns that there is no beastie. Ralph offers reassurance that they will definitely be rescued, mentioning that they’ll need a signal fire to attract passing ships and planes. At the word fire, Jack immediately takes over the group, leading a charge up the mountain to start a fire. Ralph attempts to maintain order, but everyone rushes after Jack, so he follows, too. Piggy follows last, angry at the impulsive behavior.

On the mountaintop, the boys find a huge patch of dead wood and start a fire, using Piggy’s eyeglasses. A massive bonfire that quickly burns itself out results. Jack volunteers his hunters to maintain a signal fire. Suddenly, in the midst of a complaint that no one will let him talk, Piggy sees that they’ve started a forest fire. He scolds the other boys for their lack of foresight in not first building shelters for the approaching night before racing up the mountain in defiance of Ralph. He further reprimands them for causing not only the waste of so much firewood but also the probable death of some of the littlest boys, since some of them had been playing in the area consumed by the rapidly moving fire. In the face of this news, Ralph attempts to first blame Piggy for not keeping better track of the little boys and then to convince himself and the others that the little ones might have just gone back to the platform. No one is convinced, but all are reluctant to face the reality.

Commentary

This chapter continues with and develops the themes established in Chapter 1. Of particular importance to Ralph is his new experience with control over his electorate in the face of political and social dynamics. Initially the boys are quite impressed with him, as he finds he has a natural capacity for public speaking. His promise of rescue seems farfetched given the nuclear war that precipitated the boys’ evacuation, but it is a promise he delivers well and believes himself. Even Piggy has faith in Ralph’s ability to understand and communicate the issues, although he may be giving him too much credit. When Piggy grabs the conch and says “You’re hindering Ralph. You’re not letting him get to the most important thing,” it’s not clear from Ralph’s hesitant response that he was in fact going to cover the likelihood that no one knows the boys’ location.

Piggy’s loyalty to Ralph stems from Piggy’s logical mentality—it’s logical to follow the leader’s command and assume that he is in control of the situation. The rest of the boys are more emotional. They are quickly swayed from the chief they so respected moments before. Once on the mountain, they are very much impressed by Jack, with his seemingly generous offer to have his hunters take on the fire tending duties, just as they had been enamored of Ralph earlier.

Such a loyalty shift is part of the dynamics of politics. Golding sums up the status of those who assume a leader’s role when he describes the littlest boys’ shy representative as “warped out of the perpendicular by the fierce light of publicity.” Once an individual such as Jack comes forth and makes himself heard over the rest of the crowd, the crowd views him as larger than life and expects big things—both good and bad. Leaders often attain a level of celebrity, at which point both their faults and their virtues are magnified by publicity’s distorting lens so that their smallest mistakes may be viewed by the public with the same importance granted their greatest achievements. This syndrome springs from the emotional reaction that leaders invoke.

Piggy is missing this emotional connection. He may be attempting to present the most beneficial plan of action for the group, but, because he lacks rapport with the other boys, he cannot make himself heard. Seeing that the boys pay attention to Ralph when he repeats what Piggy has already tried to communicate, he protests “‘That’s what I said! I said about the meetings and things and then you said shut up—.’ His voice lifted into the whine of virtuous recrimination. They stirred and began to shout him down.” Piggy realizes the effect he has on the boys but not the cause of it, placing too much faith in the logical approach. Truth is not always obvious, and logic is seldom universal. Not until Piggy loses his temper can he get the boys’ attention and reveal the priorities he had in mind before they raced up the mountain. He points out that the island gets cold at night and that they should have built shelters before nightfall, his reason expressed too late for their emotional deeds.

Piggy also relies too heavily on the power of the conch, on the social convention that holding the conch invests him with the right to be heard. He believes that upholding social conventions gets results. “How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t … act proper?” Piggy asks. He is partially right but is overlooking the dynamic of the crowd, the emotionality of mob rule. When Piggy screams, “You’ll break the conch!” he is in essence protesting “you’ll break the covenant,” the agreement that everyone will behave in a certain way and follow established rules. The rules are more immediately necessary for him than for the other boys who can rely on their physical skills to survive.

Jack’s rush up the mountain shatters the power of the conch rule, which is meant to ensure civil, rational conversation. Jack asserts that the conch has no power once they are on the mountain, but clearly it didn’t have that much power on the platform either: Ralph shouted for order while holding the conch but lost the crowd in the excitement, foreshadowing how later he loses his authority completely. The impulsive dash with which Jack leads the boys away from the platform symbolizes the ease with which humanity’s emotional, savage nature overwhelms its rational and civilized tendencies.

To represent the evil that is part of human nature, Golding uses the beastie described by the littlest boys. At night, they report, the beast lurks in the jungle hunting and looking to devour them; by day it disguises itself as the creeper vines that hang innocently in the trees. Here the vines are like human nature in the daylight of civilization; in the darkness of a primeval environment their true predatory nature emerges. During the forest fire, the little boys shriek at the burning creeper vines “Snakes! Snakes! Look at the snakes!” This allusion is to the serpent in the Garden of Eden who stole innocence and introduced humanity to its own physicality.

Obviously on a conscious level, the boys perceive this beast as an actual animal rather than as the conceptualization of the evil inherent in humanity. Yet these littlest boys have an immediate and instinctive recognition of the island as a threat to them: They realize that they lack the domesticity that protected them back home. The older boys ostensibly reject the little boys’ fear, presenting the logical explanation that the island is too small for large predators. Ralph is vehement on this point: “Something he had not known was there rose in him and compelled him to make the point, loudly and again. ‘But I tell you there isn’t a beast!’” He is denying that there exists a dark side to humanity.

The fire on the mountain has tremendous symbolic meaning. First, it represents hope and aspirations for the future, a gift from the gods, a tool that separates humankind from the animals. Just as the beach platform and the untamed jungle represent the duality in humanity’s behavior, the fire, also, represents both savagery (evil) and hope: “On one side the air was cool, but on the other the fire thrust out a savage arm of heat.” Golding could be describing here how societies and individuals contain these conflicting yet complementary forces. In some individuals, the savage side runs closer to the surface, as with Jack, but it exists in everyone. The boys’ fire shows that one entity can contain hot and cold, good and evil, civility and savagery.

The fire expresses another duality as well, a before and after for Ralph’s perception of their situation and his role. This first bonfire is an act of communal play for all the boys, topped off with Ralph standing on his head to mark their triumph. The fire becomes more like serious work when they make plans for specific teams to tend it. Later, with the probable deaths of some of the little boys, Ralph begins to realize that the group’s disregard for his authority can and will have grim consequences. Before the fire, the boys take time for play, a luxury available only to those protected by a civilization, not for those engaged in a fight for survival.

Ultimately, the fire is about savagery: For the boys rushing around for firewood, “Life became a race with the fire,” a phrase that quietly foreshadows Ralph’s flight for his life at the end. And while fire starting was one of the first technologies to separate humanity from the animals, to start this fire, the boys adopt a primitive use of force in taking Piggy’s glasses from him, making him an unwilling Prometheus.

Note that on this first day together, the group has already banded together to physically overwhelm Piggy—a show of physicality over intellect. It is also an uprising of children against an adult figure. Although Piggy is in the same age group as the other boys, he nonetheless holds the role of “martyred … parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of the children.” On this island, for the first time in their lives, the boys experience sheer autonomy. “This is our island … Until the grownups come and fetch us, we’ll have fun,” Ralph says, in an utterly failed and foolish prophecy.

By now the reader is aware of many of the developing symbols in the story:

    *    Ralph, the responsible leader who attempts to organize the boys for their survival and rescue. He appears practical, capable of using Piggy’s advice, able to avoid superstition and fear, and capable of developing processes for advancing their limited society.

    *    Jack, the evil that lurks within humankind, the one most in tune with his primitive urges and instincts.

    *    Piggy, the intellectual who is physically inept, the least capable of surviving on this island under these circumstances.

    *    Simon, the artistic, sensitive mystic.

    *    The conch, representing authority and civil debate.

    *    The snake-like images (the scar left by the passenger tube, the “creepers” [vines] that are encountered throughout), representing aggression, fear, and evil.

Glossary