Lord of the Flies by William Golding

On their way back to the mountain, Ralph indulges in a fantasy of cleanliness and grooming. Disheartened by the group’s dishevelment and dirt, he spends time staring out at the vastness of the sea and realizing how high the odds are against rescue. Simon joins him and, seemingly reading his mind, prophesies that Ralph will make it back home.

On the way to the mountain, Jack leads a pig hunt in which he gets slightly wounded. Ralph gets his first taste of hunting, striking a boar in the snout with his spear. After the boar gets away, the group begins a mock hunt that gets out of control and hurts the boy acting as the pig. Ralph urges the group back on their way, but the difficult path before them impedes their progress. Simon volunteers to cross the island alone to inform Piggy that the others won’t be home until after dark.

By the time they reach the base of the mountain, darkness has fallen. Spurred on by Jack’s bravado, Ralph, Jack, and Roger volunteer to continue the search for the beast while the other boys return to the platform. Once they reach the burnt patch, Ralph, tired of Jack’s continual mocking, challenges Jack to go on by himself; Jack returns from the mountaintop terrified. Roger and Ralph investigate as well and are equally terrified by the image of the beast: the dead paratrooper appears to be a live ape-like creature that seems to look at them when the breeze catches his parachute. All three boys flee to the platform in the dark.

Commentary

Ralph undergoes significant emotional and psychological development in this chapter. Following his spontaneous participation in a pig hunt, he experiences the exhilarating mixture of emotions—“I hit him! The spear stuck in”—comparable to those that drive Jack and the other hunters and which underlie Jack’s credibility with the group. He, then, “sunned himself in their new respect and felt that hunting was good after all.” Heretofore, Ralph had failed to recognize this instinct to hunt and kill in himself. Now that he has experienced these emotions, he has gained an appreciation that Jack’s perspectives and priorities are present, even if latent, within us all. This one experience communicates more to Ralph about hunting’s attractions than all the bickering with Jack before. Ralph’s humanity is deteriorating; his savage self has been touched and awakened.

Armed with this understanding, he is able to see Jack “infuriatingly, for the first time,” recognizing that he could have potentially used Jack as a resource all this time rather than competing with him. Realizing that their current path is severely hindering their progress to the mountain, he now calls on Jack’s knowledge of the island, garnered during his hunting activities, to identify an alternate path. As Jack continues to compete rather than cooperate with him, Ralph realizes that Jack becomes aggressive whenever he is no longer in charge.

As Ralph and Jack continue to compete rather than cooperate, the antipathy that each generates in the other becomes more evident. Jack becomes increasingly aggressive in situations involving Ralph and his leadership. At one point, Ralph calls on the knowledge passed on to him by Piggy and challenges Jack directly by asking him, “Why do you hate me?” He doesn’t get an answer from Jack, but the reaction of the other boys is that “something indecent had been said.” The boys recognize that Ralph is opening up the floodgates of aggression and dislike, which civilized conventions are intended to control. Nevertheless, as the situation slides increasingly toward confrontation, Ralph, the leader, the symbol of civility and hope, “turned away first.”

Throughout this chapter, Ralph displays and surprises himself with his coolness under pressure—despite his participation in the crazed attack on Robert and in contrast to his grief-stricken, emotional loss of control in the last chapter. Again and again, he shows a realistic grasp of their situation only to be jeered at by Jack. Despite his pride in hitting the boar, he understands immediately that boys with “foolish wooden stick[s]” as spears are no match for the large powerful animal. “But he’d do us!” he protests when Jack orders the hunters to follow the boar’s flight. Jack follows alone and is wounded for his lack of sense. Later Ralph is shocked to find himself accompanying Jack up the mountain in the dark to search for the beast, but his response does not betray him. The coolness of his reply renders invalid Jack’s supremely taunting invitation. Such instinctual calm reflects again the same strength Ralph displayed in the previous chapter when he made sure to take the lead at castle rock. While Jack’s aggressive resentment has no room for reason, Ralph is not afraid once they have set off to ask for another volunteer to accompany them or to point out that their journey up the mountain in the dark is foolish.

Despite his coolness, Ralph can’t help competing with Jack, much to the bloodthirsty crowd’s delight. Hearing Jack issue to Ralph the invitation to join him in the nighttime search for the beast, “the other boys … turned back to sample this fresh rub of two spirits in the dark.” The boys as a group display a certain lust for conflict, evident not only in their fascinated appraisal of the conflict of Jack and Ralph but also in their frenzied attack on Robert. The game innocently begun by Robert and Ralph is not so much boys at play as the beast at work.

Note that Golding uses the phrase “overmastering” to describe the urge to inflict pain, evoking the theme developed in Chapter 4 with the littlun Henry’s experiments with mastery over the tide pool creatures and the hunters imposing their collective will on the slaughtered pig. Stimulated by this chapter’s unsuccessful hunt and Robert’s vulnerability at the hands of the crowd, the boys are mastered themselves by a larger force, impulses they can neither understand nor acknowledge. Even the victim, Robert, cannot address directly the forces that were driving the group. He alludes to his narrowly averted fate when he points out that to improve this so-called game that “You want a real pig … because you’ve got to kill him.” His initial response, however, is to downplay his justifiable fear and attempt to regain his place within the group by saying “Oh, my bum!” as if a sore bottom were the extent of the damage. Perhaps he realizes on an instinctive level that maintaining his status as one of the group is critical to survival: The next time the boys play this game, the outsider, Simon, dies.

Ralph attempts to defuse the frightening attack in which he has just participated by placing the beating within the context of their civilization’s legitimate outlets for aggression. “‘Just a game,’ said Ralph uneasily. ‘I got jolly badly hurt at rugger once.’” Maurice, on the other hand, looks to refine the process, suggesting that they add a drum and a fire to do the dance “properly,” although he’s not sure of why he feels they need these things. Maurice seems to be speaking out of some primeval urge to recreate the rituals of a tribal sacrifice. While both Robert and Roger point out that they’ll need a pig to complete the game, realizing that this game properly ends in death, Jack looks for a human, someone who could dress up as a pig. He too must acknowledge on some level that this game will inevitably have fatal consequences and, like a true dictator, suggests using one of the littluns, the most vulnerable and, in his eyes, the least valuable of the group.

Given Simon’s need to solitude, it’s not surprising that he volunteers to take Ralph’s message to Piggy by crossing the island alone. His loner tendencies make the other boys think he’s odd, but, for the reader, Simon’s credibility as a mystic is established in this chapter. As if he is reading Ralph’s mind, Simon interrupts Ralph’s strained, tense regard of the ocean’s vastness by telling him, “You’ll get back to where you came from.” Ralph responds with the opinion all the boys hold of Simon: “You’re batty.” Simon knows he’s right, however, and he repeats his prophecy with emphasis. Note that he uses “you” instead of “we,” realizing, perhaps, on some level that he, himself, will not make it back. Consumed by his own concerns, Ralph doesn’t question Simon’s omission of himself but takes comfort in the express certainty of the other boy’s prophecy.

Ralph seeks comfort throughout this chapter in images of home, indulging in a fantasy of bathing and grooming and a recollection of the peaceful life of ponies, cereal and cream, and children’s books he had once known. Ralph’s perspective on the island has changed drastically from the first day, when “A kind of glamour was spread over … the scene.” Now as he looks at the other boys and sees how thoroughly grimy they are, he finds their condition very different from “the spectacular dirt of boys who have fallen into mud,” a temporary dirtying probably initiated by some good-natured horseplay and easily remedied by a warm bath. This dirtiness is an outer manifestation of the darkening of the soul—the emergence of the evil within.

Ralph now longs for the comfort of the familiar, but the home he wishes for is a glamorized ideal. He remembers his former life as a place where “Everything was all right; everything was good-humored and friendly.” The reader, of course, is aware that back home—the world the boys have left—exactly the same sorts of human weaknesses which dominate the boys are playing out in the form of nuclear war. As Ralph looks out at the ocean and viscerally experiences its size and power, he considers how the other side of the island offers “the shield of the quiet lagoon” and midday mirages to protect them all from the truth of the ocean’s vastness. Faced with the reality of the ocean, he feels as though hope for rescue, and by extension for civilization, has become a mirage.

The images of civilization are in his head as are its voices—the same voices that conditioned Roger’s aim to miss Henry, for example, and Piggy’s, chiding him for being childish and another voice scolding him for being foolish enough to allow Jack to goad him into seeking out a potentially dangerous animal in the dark with only two other boys and spears of wood. In counterpart to the voices of civilization in his head is Jack’s voice, a disembodied voice in the dark like the figurative devil on his shoulder: “‘If you don’t want to go on,’ said the voice sarcastically, ‘I’ll go up by myself.’” By not attributing this challenge directly to Jack, Golding not only indicates the supreme darkness in which the boys are working but also emphasizes the evil that Jack represents. He describes Jack as a “stain in the darkness;” when Jack leaves, “The stain vanished. Another took its place.”

The other stain is Roger, the darkened figure who joined them when all the other boys fled to the safety of the beach. Roger has already established himself as mean-spirited, coldly following the littlun Henry to frighten him with stones that just miss. During Robert’s beating, Roger was “fighting to get close,” to take part in the hurting before it ended. Finally, it is symbolically significant that, in this second ascent up the mountain, Roger, who is evil and sadistic, has replaced Simon, who is spiritual and mystic, representing the devolution of the boys toward their primitive, savage nature. Later chapters reveal Roger as more sadistic even than Jack.

Confronted with the dead paratrooper, however, Roger is just as terrified as the other two boys. They fear the dead man because they believe him to be a live, predatory creature. He is merely a catalyst, however, for the savagery that will run amok on the island. Just as Ralph feels himself taken over by the bloodlust that infects the hunters, he gets a taste of hatred as a means of courage, forcing himself to approach the false beast by fusing “his fear and loathing into a hatred,” a hatred that bolsters his will and drives him forward to investigate where his good sense tells him not to go. When this ape-like creature “lifted its head, holding toward them the ruin of a face,” it is showing them the ruin of their humanity as their instinctive evil begins to take over when they are weakened by fear.

Glossary