Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Jack, alone on a pig hunt, has clearly learned some tracking techniques. Frustrated that his day’s hunt has ended yet again without a kill, he returns from the jungle to the area where Ralph and Simon work on building shelters.

Ralph expresses his frustration: Although all the boys have agreed to help build shelters, only Simon actually puts in the time and effort alongside Ralph. All the other boys are off playing, bathing, or hunting with Jack, even though Jack and his hunters have failed so far to produce meat. Ralph emphasizes the need for sturdy shelters, while Jack insists that he and the other boys need meat and tries to explain his compulsion to hunt. This difference—and the undercurrent of rancor—makes both boys uncomfortable given the relationship that had sprung up between them on the first day’s exploring adventure.

Also in this chapter, a new side of Simon is revealed. He has a secret place in the jungle, a sort of hut formed by vines, boulders, and trees. After helping Ralph with the shelters all day, he sneaks off to this shelter, pausing first to help the littluns gather some choice fruit and making sure that he hasn’t been followed.

Commentary

In the first two chapters, Golding established regulated speech as a hallmark of civilization, as the boys set up the platform as a site for assemblies ordered by the conch. Ralph uses the conch to mimic the practice of “hands up,” which all the boys know from school, the very place where literacy and verbal communication is systematically developed. In this chapter, Golding further develops this theme: Whereas verbal language is the sole property of civilization, silence is a property of nature. As Jack hunts in the “uncommunicative forest,” he finds the “silence of the forest was more oppressive than the heat.”

Ironically, when, in this chapter, Jack encounters Ralph at the shelters, Ralph comments on the uselessness of talk, railing about the abandoned resolutions to work everyone voices at the assemblies. “Meetings. Don’t we love meetings?” Ralph says bitterly, confused by the assemblies’ lack of efficacy. He had been counting on the meetings to provide both framework and impetus for focused action but has found that, of a crowd, only a few actually follow through. Ralph’s vision of order is one most of the other boys share but lack the self-discipline to carry out. With language as his only tool, Ralph’s authority lacks the threat possessed by parents and schoolmasters to enforce the rules and resolutions. Although he doesn’t like building huts any better than any of the others, he is able to control his impulses and do what is necessary.

Jack could serve as an enforcer of rightful authority and necessary discipline, but he does not share Ralph’s civilized vision. He is fast losing the traces of civilization and tuning into his animal self: crouched “dog-like” and reacting to a sudden bird cry with “a hiss of indrawn breath … ape-like among the tangle of trees.” Jack seems to be losing his powers of rational thought, as well: Not only does he not share Ralph’s priority on rescue, he “had to think for a moment before he could remember what rescue was.” In trying to explain his feeling of being hunted while on the hunt, he finds verbalizing his experiences a great effort. The ability to express himself verbally is a skill necessary to civilization, not to hunting. His efforts go now to communicating with the nonverbal jungle, reading the signs left by the pigs. Where as Ralph can control his impulses for the good of the community, Jack puts all his focus on developing his impulses—in this case, his need to hunt.

Furthermore, neither boy can communicate his perspective to the other, and neither considers the other’s viewpoint. This lack of communication underlies innumerable conflicts, and the lack of understanding frequently has more to do with unwillingness on the listener’s part than on the speaker’s. Ralph and Simon’s reactions to Jack’s revelation about feeling hunted while hunting are true to form for both of them.

When Jack tries to convey his experience of the beast, he meets with resistance from Ralph. As the representative of reasonable society, Ralph is “incredulous and faintly indignant” that Jack could be granting any credit to the idea of a beast. Ralph is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of a beast. In contrast, the mystic visionary Simon is “intent” on understanding how Jack’s feeling corresponds with the intuitive knowledge Simon has of human nature. Like the littluns, Jack’s sense of the beast is formless and inarticulate; his domain is the emotions, which rule and fuel his animal nature. In truth, Jack is being hunted, in a sense, and both he and Simon, to varying degrees, recognize this. Ralph can’t acknowledge this and continue to believe in what he believes in and relies on: the basic civility of man.

This chapter reveals Simon as the mystic. While Golding doesn’t specify why Simon has a secret place or what he does there, clearly Simon feels the need to be sheltered from the other boys. “He’s queer. He’s funny,” says Ralph of his only work partner, which is the reaction mystics typically provoke from mainstream society. Simon is different from the other boys not only due the physical frailty of fainting spells but also in his consistently expressed concern for the other more vulnerable boys. In the previous chapter, he sticks up for Piggy when Jack verbally attacks him for not gathering firewood, pointing out that the fire was started with Piggy’s glasses. In this chapter, Simon takes the time to pluck from the trees the choice fruits that the littluns can’t reach and passing them down “to the endless, outstretched hands,” an almost saintly image.

Simon’s role as a visionary is alluded to in this chapter not only by his hidden place of meditation but also by Golding’s description of his eyes: “so bright they had deceived Ralph into thinking him delightfully gay and wicked.” While Piggy has the glasses, another symbol of vision, Simon has the bright eyes that later in the novel see the truth about the beast.

To highlight Ralph’s growing disenchantment with Jack and disillusionment with being a leader, Golding brings back together, in this chapter, the three boys who went exploring that first day. Caught up in the glamour of newness and adventure, the three seemed to become instant friends. By now, however, Ralph cannot overlook that Jack’s priority on hunting is undermining his own efforts to create a home for the boys, that Simon is not the mischievous prankster Ralph perceived him to be, and that the boys in general quickly forget their promises to work toward a common goal when faced with the more immediate gratification of eating and playing. Ralph has come to the realization that “people were never quite what you thought they were.”

Glossary